Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Women aren't supposed to enjoy sex is I think one of the roots of this. Abortion makes it possible for women to enjoy sex without suffering the consequences. But fallen women should be punished for what they've done.
This also explains why contraception is immediately now also a target. It's another way for women to escape being punished for enjoying sex.
That is certainly a part of it.
Well, I suppose, if women are not supposed to enjoy it, they had better stop doing it altogether. No need for contraception or abortion. No more children of course but there are plenty of people in the world already and, anyway, heaven is where it's at.
So - a sex strike for US women it is then. Un marriage blanc for all!!
You joke but that would sort it. They'd cave in 48 hours, RMT eat your heart out.
Visual representation of what happens when chaps are denied an outlet.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
Haven't you noticed that it is Stonewall - very keen indeed on trans rights & self-ID in particular which has explicitly since 2015 been campaigning to remove existing sex-based exemptions benefiting women in the Equality Act? It also wants to abolish the crime of rape by deception.
A group which wants to do that is not on the side of women.
Haven't you noticed Scottish Ministers - currently campaigning to get self-ID in Scotland - citing Malta as one of the countries to be emulated because of their stance on this topic. This would be the Malta that has an absolute abortion ban & one of whose Ministers recently said that Maltese women who went abroad for abortion should be hunted down & punished.
Haven't you noticed the violence of transactivists (as in the recent demo in Bristol) attacking women, threatening them with violence, including sexual violence telling them to go home & look after their children? Haven't you noticed the number of people with sexual offences against women & children claiming to be trans demanding that women abandon their boundaries, which are there for their protection.
Haven't you noticed Stonewall attacking lesbians for not wanting to have sex with men with penises, calling them racists, similar to anti-semites or those who were pro-apartheid? Haven't you noticed Stonewall trying to redefine sexual orientation as gender orientation? How offensive & harmful to gay rights is that? My gay son is attracted to men with male bodies. Not to a woman who feels herself to be a man. But if he says that, transactivists will call him transphobic.
Trans people in the U.K. currently have exactly the same legal rights & protections under the Equality Act as other groups. I am glad of that. I will fight to stop anyone taking those away. I will fight for those with gender dysphoria to have the care & support they need.
But it is not trans rights which are at risk of being eliminated in this country. It is the rights of women - to have single sex spaces, single sex rape & domestic violence shelters, single sex prisons, single sex sport etc & the right & ability to fight sex discrimination - which are being put at risk by those who think a man with a male body is a woman just because he feels he is. This is nonsense on stilts & puts at risk not just women but all the other protected characteristics. Why can't a white person say they should be considered "black" or "disabled" if they feel they are? What do you think that will do to the rights of black people or the disabled if categories can be Id'd into at will?
Both the extreme transactivists & the anti-abortionists prefer ideology over physical biological reality. Both think they know better than women themselves what womanhood is & how women should live their lives. Both are sexist & misogynist. Both must be resisted. And those who wish to attack gay rights will find no stronger defender of those rights than me.
You’re ignoring my point.
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
" The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. "
IME this is a misreading. Trans rights has thoroughly split feminism in the UK, with some feminists believing strongly in trans rights; others believing that trans rights thoroughly trample on women's rights. Part of the reason the debate gets so febrile is that *both* sides think they are speaking out on behalf of all women.
And the anti-trans feminists can be just as extreme as the committed transfeminists.
Then there is the issue of not only what a 'woman' is; what is 'trans' ? Someone post-op, pre-op, someone going through the process and living as their chosen gender, or someone who chooses to be a certain gender on a certain day? People seem to pick whatever group best matches their argument.
I would agree with some of that. I didn't state or imply that a majority of committed feminists are opposed to the Trans extremists (how could I measure that?) but it is notable that the most coherent critics who have been subject to intimidation are female feminist campaigners and academics. Partly this is because they have a thought through analysis of sex and gender. I think initially a lot of people and politicians just vaguely went along with what they thought was a simple equality campaign like anti-racism. They then were bemused and out of their depth versus Stonewall (mark2) etc. Can you imagine the average backbencher trying to articulate a deep philosophical argument?
I disagree that there is equality of aggression from both sides of this debate (in the UK). The intimidation, cancel culture, closing of free speech is overwhelmingly from Trans extremist side. Not surprising as an intelligent debate would expose their intellectual and moral incoherence.
My issue is with your use of 'trans extremists' and 'extremist Trans activists'; as if the trans-exclusionary side are any less extreme. They can be (*) just as extreme, but in different ways.
(*) And the problem, as ever, is the extremes make all the noise.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
If states prevent women from travelling to other states and if this is upheld by the Supreme Court, it is hard to see how the US can survive as a single country.
Kavanaugh's concurrence makes that unlikely I'd have thought.
Yes, Kavanaugh did seem clear that it would not be constitutional for States, having being handed the power to legislate on abortion, could legislate to prevent people travelling to other States.
And yet crossing State lines to commit an offence is a pretty fundamental concept in US Federal law, specifically in cases involving minors. I wouldn't be so confident.
Isn’t that concept simply to allow the Feds to enforce Federal Law, because two States are involved.
So a murder is an issue for the State where it happened to deal with, but someone crossing State lines to commit a murder means that the FBI can investigate it?
Also IIRC if you go from Texas to Alabama to commit murder it’s an offence in Alabama not in Texas. The Feds get involved before of the crossing by boundaries but they don’t typically prosecute
I am generally uncomfortable with extraterritorial laws: it should not be possible for Texas to make sodomy illegal for Texans in Connecticut.
The same goes with abortion. You cannot criminalize your citizens for their actions in other States. (And think what it would mean for extradition: it would blow a massive hole in the US system for transporting suspects from state to state.)
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
Maybe not but I doubt you would get any gay couples wanting to move from Connecticut to Utah, except to admire some clean cut young Mormons
If you think about it for a moment that is a really unpleasant post.
I’ll do you the courtesy of assuming it was unintentional
Having thought about it, I cannot see why you consider this post to be unpleasant. Perhaps I am just too innocent, and perhaps you could enlighten me?
What I do find unpleasant is the way some posters here go in for bullying others.
The insinuation that gay men (I assume) have a particular “thing” for “clean cut young Mormons”.
Suggesting that (a) they are unusually superficial; (b) that they have a particular liking for young men; (c) that they don’ have the capability of a stable marriage with a life partner; and (d) that Utah is the sort of place that there is no other reason to go to except for male eye candy
It treads pretty close to a lot of attacks on gay men that are used by people who are intolerant of their life choices
Thank you for the reply and the explanation, Mr Waters. Appreciated.
I do not know a vast number of gay men, but based on the sample of those I do know, I would have thought the supposition to be not without foundation. It would not hold true for everybody, of course, but as a generalisation, I would have thought it good enough. Especially for a flippant throw-away remark by young HY.
As for the attractions of Utah as a state, I wonder if our PB Travel Team can offer us any guidance on what these might be?
From your second paragraph, I infer that you are not intolerant of other people's life choices. So we have found some common ground. And that is positive.
If it was suggest a gay couple would notice a cute guy walking down the street then sure - in the same way that most heterosexual men notice a pretty woman, or - for reasons I don’t understand - many women like Diet Coke adverts.
But he was suggesting moving across the country solely for the purpose of ogling young men…
I’ve only been to Utah once, for lunch. It was a bit meh to be honest.
Utah's attractions are almost entirely natural - and impressive, from the salt flats to Arches, Bryce and Zion Canyons and other geological wonders. There are also very wide roads in Salt Lake City, if you're into that sort of thing.
Utah is one of the most beautiful states in America, with magnificent contrasts from the snowy peaked north to the burning red rocks of the south.
But the humanscape is also interesting, from the orthodox polygamous Mormons of Colorado City to the neo-hipsters of Salt Lake and the Hollywood types of Sundance Film Fest
Dinos too. Though some might be equivocal on this.
Raining at Headingley and looks like it will do for quite a while! Dry at Taunton for the women's Test though!
Yeah that's why I laid NZ rather than backed England yesterday.
Surely the draw should be favourite?
Not yet. This match probably only requires a maximum of 30 overs to resolve it one way or another. In short, if we start at tea a result is pretty much guaranteed.
I hope you're right; and it does look as though the rain is going to stop this afternoon.
I'm not sure he really believes anything, does he?
He doesn't no. Which wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't the PM. Given he is, it still wouldn't be so terrible if he was competent. But given he isn't, it actually still wouldn't be so unutterably awful if he was honest and had a sense of public service. And given he isn't, and doesn't, last throw of the dice, it STILL wouldn't be the abomination to end all abominations if he wasn't such a facetious airhead wallowing in born-to-rule entitlement. But it's a full house. Quite spectacular really.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Women aren't supposed to enjoy sex is I think one of the roots of this. Abortion makes it possible for women to enjoy sex without suffering the consequences. But fallen women should be punished for what they've done.
This also explains why contraception is immediately now also a target. It's another way for women to escape being punished for enjoying sex.
That is certainly a part of it.
Well, I suppose, if women are not supposed to enjoy it, they had better stop doing it altogether. No need for contraception or abortion. No more children of course but there are plenty of people in the world already and, anyway, heaven is where it's at.
So - a sex strike for US women it is then. Un marriage blanc for all!!
You joke but that would sort it. They'd cave in 48 hours, RMT eat your heart out.
Visual representation of what happens when chaps are denied an outlet.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
If the overturning of Roe v Wade - and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County decision - show us one thing, it is that we can never take the rights we have - no matter how long we have had them for - for granted. It is foolish to dismiss small determined one issue groups. They can - precisely because they are so focused on one issue - get their way more easily than we like to think.
The Pope heads the Roman Catholic Church which has 1.3 billion members and the Vatican has already welcomed the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v Wade. As have the most hardline Protestant evangelical churches. In many Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East abortion is also illegal.
Opposition to abortion globally goes beyond just small one issue groups even if in the West the consensus now is generally for abortion with some difference on time limits
Islam is happier with abortion than Catholicism in general. Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East have some limits on abortion, but rarely ban in outright. If you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law#Independent_countries and look at the first column, abortion is only completely prohibited in Catholic countries.
Fair enough, though the only nations with the death penalty for homosexuality are Muslim.
Roman Catholics bete noire no 1 is abortion, Islam's bete noire no 1 is homosexuality
I believe (predominantly Christian) Uganda has the death penalty for homosexuality.
Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda but the maximum penalty is still life in prison, not death as in Saudi Arabia and Iran
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
" The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. "
IME this is a misreading. Trans rights has thoroughly split feminism in the UK, with some feminists believing strongly in trans rights; others believing that trans rights thoroughly trample on women's rights. Part of the reason the debate gets so febrile is that *both* sides think they are speaking out on behalf of all women.
And the anti-trans feminists can be just as extreme as the committed transfeminists.
Then there is the issue of not only what a 'woman' is; what is 'trans' ? Someone post-op, pre-op, someone going through the process and living as their chosen gender, or someone who chooses to be a certain gender on a certain day? People seem to pick whatever group best matches their argument.
The trans / anti-trans split in feminism has existed since at least the 70s 2nd wave. It caused massive arguments then too.
My point to Cyclefree is not to argue about the rights & wrongs of this issue, but to ask her take a close look at some of the allies the GC feminists have been cosying up to & to consider the consequences for her & her daughters if those groups were to gain power.
Some UK GC feminists have been quite explicit that they care more about the “trans threat to women” as they see it than they do about abortion, contraception, or any other rights & are quite happy to join up with chisto-fascist groups both here & in the USA in pursuit of their goals. This seems to me the height of idiocy: Do you really think that women will be better off here, or elsewhere, if you win your trans arguments by siding with these people?
Be careful what you wish for.
The same should be said to those who side with the transactivists. There are some on that side of the debate who ally themselves with pro-paedohile groups. See WPATH which until recently was taking advice from a Californian Professor who participates in paedophiliac castration fetishes and wants to expand the transgender umbrella to include such people. WPATH was recently involved in writing a guide on eunuchs - as a valid gender identity - including detailed advice on castration, which was published by the Scottish NHS. It was then withdrawn when protests were raised because it had been published in error. Why it was written might have been the better question? And why a body which does not even consist of medical professionals was involved is another one?
I do not know which feminists @Phil is referring to. Perhaps he could name them. And perhaps he could name those Christo-fascist groups they have allied to.
I certainly do not ally myself with such people.
Interestingly it is the Church of Scotland which recently came out in favour of self-ID in Scotland. So they are most certainly not gender critical or helping feminists.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
If the overturning of Roe v Wade - and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County decision - show us one thing, it is that we can never take the rights we have - no matter how long we have had them for - for granted. It is foolish to dismiss small determined one issue groups. They can - precisely because they are so focused on one issue - get their way more easily than we like to think.
The Pope heads the Roman Catholic Church which has 1.3 billion members and the Vatican has already welcomed the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v Wade. As have the most hardline Protestant evangelical churches. In many Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East abortion is also illegal.
Opposition to abortion globally goes beyond just small one issue groups even if in the West the consensus now is generally for abortion with some difference on time limits
Islam is happier with abortion than Catholicism in general. Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East have some limits on abortion, but rarely ban in outright. If you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law#Independent_countries and look at the first column, abortion is only completely prohibited in Catholic countries.
Fair enough, though the only nations with the death penalty for homosexuality are Muslim.
Roman Catholics bete noire no 1 is abortion, Islam's bete noire no 1 is homosexuality
Roman Catholicism and (even more so) Islam are both diverse communities with many different attitudes. There are differing opinions among adherents, between adherents and "clergy". I would always be careful of sweeping statements. Sufi-inspired Islam in Kosovo is very different from Wahabism in Saudi Arabia. What the Vatican says is very different from what hundreds of millions of Catholics do.
Islamic views on homosexuality are somewhat tangential to the discussion. On abortion and contraception, certain Christian groups are notable for often taking a more extreme position than others within an Abrahamic tradition.
But religion is never separate from politics. The Catholic Church is set against the death penalty, but Catholics on the US Right never pay attention to that. The New Testament repeatedly decries divorce, but the US Christian Right didn't mind the multiply-divorced Trump. The Republican Party explicitly sought out abortion as a wedge issue some decades ago, producing a feedback loop that made abortion more politically central to their agenda, while also pushing abortion up the agenda among white Protestant Churches.
NB Cyclefree: I do find it interesting that you respond to my query not with a direct response but a Gish Gallop of whataboutism. Did you have that text to hand ready to post, or did you type it all out just for me?
Some of those points you make are false, some of them are true but irrelevant & some of them I actually agree with. But if I took the time to respond to every single point (and my, there were a lot of them) it would never end & the endless argumentation would end up with everyone having completely forgotten the original question. Which I guess was your goal in the first place.
But the point stands: These people are coming for you, if they can manage it. Distracting you with trans politics is just part of the game - trans people are a side issue for them, a tasty snack on the way to the main event & if you think you can get what you want by siding with them & not have that rebound on you & yours in deeply personal & awful ways in the future I would personally suggest that you’re sorely mistaken.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
If the overturning of Roe v Wade - and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County decision - show us one thing, it is that we can never take the rights we have - no matter how long we have had them for - for granted. It is foolish to dismiss small determined one issue groups. They can - precisely because they are so focused on one issue - get their way more easily than we like to think.
The Pope heads the Roman Catholic Church which has 1.3 billion members and the Vatican has already welcomed the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v Wade. As have the most hardline Protestant evangelical churches. In many Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East abortion is also illegal.
Opposition to abortion globally goes beyond just small one issue groups even if in the West the consensus now is generally for abortion with some difference on time limits
Islam is happier with abortion than Catholicism in general. Muslim nations in North Africa and the Middle East have some limits on abortion, but rarely ban in outright. If you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law#Independent_countries and look at the first column, abortion is only completely prohibited in Catholic countries.
Fair enough, though the only nations with the death penalty for homosexuality are Muslim.
Roman Catholics bete noire no 1 is abortion, Islam's bete noire no 1 is homosexuality
Roman Catholicism and (even more so) Islam are both diverse communities with many different attitudes. There are differing opinions among adherents, between adherents and "clergy". I would always be careful of sweeping statements. Sufi-inspired Islam in Kosovo is very different from Wahabism in Saudi Arabia. What the Vatican says is very different from what hundreds of millions of Catholics do.
Islamic views on homosexuality are somewhat tangential to the discussion. On abortion and contraception, certain Christian groups are notable for often taking a more extreme position than others within an Abrahamic tradition.
But religion is never separate from politics. The Catholic Church is set against the death penalty, but Catholics on the US Right never pay attention to that. The New Testament repeatedly decries divorce, but the US Christian Right didn't mind the multiply-divorced Trump. The Republican Party explicitly sought out abortion as a wedge issue some decades ago, producing a feedback loop that made abortion more politically central to their agenda, while also pushing abortion up the agenda among white Protestant Churches.
It is notable however that now most judges on the Supreme Court are Roman Catholic, on abortion at least the Court has followed the Vatican's guidance and reversed Roe v Wade
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
One of those cases where you need to know all the background; and secondly that's why we have a Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) to get it right if the judge is wrong.
No idea about this case, but defendants have been known to use 'change of lawyer' as a tactic.
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
In fairness, I think that actually is an honest mistake as, if you read the article attached to it, the bars do indeed accurately represent the views of 2019 Tory voters as the text says.
The error is that the numbers shown are for all respondents rather than just 2019 Tories. So the bars are in line with the description and show most 2019 Tory voters sticking with him but a very substantial minority not doing so (crucially, as they can't afford to lose anything like that number).
Put it this way - had they put the correct numbers in to match the bars and description, it would actually have looked rather better for the PM, not worse. So it must be sloppy editing rather than dishonesty - as it simply doesn't work to Johnson's advantage.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
How many of those have switched from saying it wouldn't happen to defending it ?
The stuff going on in America is just the product of extreme polarisation and best understood that way. Both sides (left and right) are extremely misguided and pursue insane policies and they goad each other in to more and more stupid policies. It is really a question of which dystopia is more benign, and for me at least it is a very difficult one to answer.
I think that’s wrong. We have one side plotting coups and almost succeeding, and with a large amount of supposedly ‘Moderate’ Republicans refusing to disavow a man and a movement that might very well succeed in not certifying an election in the future. That’s setting aside Roe v Wade.
Then we have another side who, depending on one’s point of view, might bang on too much about Trans people or Climate Change or whatever, but aren’t that dissimilar from the main UK parties economically, socially etc.
The US has a legitimacy crisis that is clearly being stoked by both sides. You need to take account of the whole spectrum of US politics rather than just treating mainstream Democrats as representative of the side opposing the extreme right.
NB Cyclefree: I do find it interesting that you respond to my query not with a direct response but a Gish Gallop of whataboutism. Did you have that text to hand ready to post, or did you type it all out just for me?
Some of those points you make are false, some of them are true but irrelevant & some of them I actually agree with. But if I took the time to respond to every single point (and my, there were a lot of them) it would never end & the endless argumentation would end up with everyone having completely forgotten the original question. Which I guess was your goal in the first place.
But the point stands: These people are coming for you, if they can manage it. Distracting you with trans politics is just part of the game - trans people are a side issue for them, a tasty snack on the way to the main event & if you think you can get what you want by siding with them & not have that rebound on you & yours in deeply personal & awful ways in the future I would personally suggest that you’re sorely mistaken.
In other words: it's much too hard work for you to respond to her argument so you're going to stick to ad hominem instead?
The Russians do seem to be doing a terrible job of hiding ammo dumps. Oh well, what a shame.
It was clear even from before the war started, that Ukraine has a top-notch intelligence operation in place.
In totally unrelated news, there’s still a NATO E-3 Sentry, two US Rivet Joints, and an F-35 over Eastern Moldova, and a Global Hawk drone in the Black Sea near Crimea.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
Stonehenge is fine but not really worth the cost for non EH members. Take headphones as the audio tour is now a phone app.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
Haven't you noticed that it is Stonewall - very keen indeed on trans rights & self-ID in particular which has explicitly since 2015 been campaigning to remove existing sex-based exemptions benefiting women in the Equality Act? It also wants to abolish the crime of rape by deception.
A group which wants to do that is not on the side of women.
Haven't you noticed Scottish Ministers - currently campaigning to get self-ID in Scotland - citing Malta as one of the countries to be emulated because of their stance on this topic. This would be the Malta that has an absolute abortion ban & one of whose Ministers recently said that Maltese women who went abroad for abortion should be hunted down & punished.
Haven't you noticed the violence of transactivists (as in the recent demo in Bristol) attacking women, threatening them with violence, including sexual violence telling them to go home & look after their children? Haven't you noticed the number of people with sexual offences against women & children claiming to be trans demanding that women abandon their boundaries, which are there for their protection.
Haven't you noticed Stonewall attacking lesbians for not wanting to have sex with men with penises, calling them racists, similar to anti-semites or those who were pro-apartheid? Haven't you noticed Stonewall trying to redefine sexual orientation as gender orientation? How offensive & harmful to gay rights is that? My gay son is attracted to men with male bodies. Not to a woman who feels herself to be a man. But if he says that, transactivists will call him transphobic.
Trans people in the U.K. currently have exactly the same legal rights & protections under the Equality Act as other groups. I am glad of that. I will fight to stop anyone taking those away. I will fight for those with gender dysphoria to have the care & support they need.
But it is not trans rights which are at risk of being eliminated in this country. It is the rights of women - to have single sex spaces, single sex rape & domestic violence shelters, single sex prisons, single sex sport etc & the right & ability to fight sex discrimination - which are being put at risk by those who think a man with a male body is a woman just because he feels he is. This is nonsense on stilts & puts at risk not just women but all the other protected characteristics. Why can't a white person say they should be considered "black" or "disabled" if they feel they are? What do you think that will do to the rights of black people or the disabled if categories can be Id'd into at will?
Both the extreme transactivists & the anti-abortionists prefer ideology over physical biological reality. Both think they know better than women themselves what womanhood is & how women should live their lives. Both are sexist & misogynist. Both must be resisted. And those who wish to attack gay rights will find no stronger defender of those rights than me.
You’re ignoring my point.
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
Doesn’t that worry you?
The attacks on gay rights and on those with gender dysphoria and womens' rights does worry me. I am - unfashionable as it may be - strongly socially liberal.
But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides. In some cases, they are explicitly pro-paedophile and against boundaries. Does this not worry you? I have spelt out names. You have spoken in generalities.
I do not and will not ally myself with such people. I am not really an activist. But I can make myself clear and I can disassociate myself from and attack those who seek to push back on rights which I think civilised society should value.
What I am not going to do is keep quiet when I see existing rights for women under attack here.
Last year a U.K. court ruled that it was acceptable for a woman in prison to be raped if that was the price she had to pay to validate a trans identified male's feelings. I find that appalling, truly sickening. Single sex prisons were campaigned for by Elizabeth Fry in order to prevent the sexual exploitation of women in prisons. Now a century later we have gone backwards to preserve the rights of male sex offenders who - entirely coincidentally - claim to be women when they are caught and sentenced.
That is who you ally with - men who abuse trans rights to rape women. That this is happening in Britain today with scarcely a peep from anyone should sicken any decent person.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
I took the little 'un to Stonehenge three years ago, before Covid. He had just turned five, and had been interested in Stonehenge for a couple of years, had made models of it, read books (with help) on it, talked incessantly about it, made Close Encounters of the Third Kind style food models of it.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
Hmm, looking at flight tracker, there’s an emergency Thompson airlines Boeing 767 out of Manchester, currently holding in circles near Buxton. Hope it’s nothing too serious.
NB Cyclefree: I do find it interesting that you respond to my query not with a direct response but a Gish Gallop of whataboutism. Did you have that text to hand ready to post, or did you type it all out just for me?
Some of those points you make are false, some of them are true but irrelevant & some of them I actually agree with. But if I took the time to respond to every single point (and my, there were a lot of them) it would never end & the endless argumentation would end up with everyone having completely forgotten the original question. Which I guess was your goal in the first place.
But the point stands: These people are coming for you, if they can manage it. Distracting you with trans politics is just part of the game - trans people are a side issue for them, a tasty snack on the way to the main event & if you think you can get what you want by siding with them & not have that rebound on you & yours in deeply personal & awful ways in the future I would personally suggest that you’re sorely mistaken.
In other words: it's much too hard work for you to respond to her argument so you're going to stick to ad hominem instead?
Did you count the number of assertions in that text? It would take days to go through each of them & give them the treatment they deserved.
But that’s the point of a Gish Gallop: to overwhelm with a flurry of assertions, knowing that the other party doesn’t have the time to refute (or even engage with) them all. You swamp the issue you don’t want to deal with a torrent of irrelevence, in the hope that the audience doesn’t notice.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
Haven't you noticed that it is Stonewall - very keen indeed on trans rights & self-ID in particular which has explicitly since 2015 been campaigning to remove existing sex-based exemptions benefiting women in the Equality Act? It also wants to abolish the crime of rape by deception.
A group which wants to do that is not on the side of women.
Haven't you noticed Scottish Ministers - currently campaigning to get self-ID in Scotland - citing Malta as one of the countries to be emulated because of their stance on this topic. This would be the Malta that has an absolute abortion ban & one of whose Ministers recently said that Maltese women who went abroad for abortion should be hunted down & punished.
Haven't you noticed the violence of transactivists (as in the recent demo in Bristol) attacking women, threatening them with violence, including sexual violence telling them to go home & look after their children? Haven't you noticed the number of people with sexual offences against women & children claiming to be trans demanding that women abandon their boundaries, which are there for their protection.
Haven't you noticed Stonewall attacking lesbians for not wanting to have sex with men with penises, calling them racists, similar to anti-semites or those who were pro-apartheid? Haven't you noticed Stonewall trying to redefine sexual orientation as gender orientation? How offensive & harmful to gay rights is that? My gay son is attracted to men with male bodies. Not to a woman who feels herself to be a man. But if he says that, transactivists will call him transphobic.
Trans people in the U.K. currently have exactly the same legal rights & protections under the Equality Act as other groups. I am glad of that. I will fight to stop anyone taking those away. I will fight for those with gender dysphoria to have the care & support they need.
But it is not trans rights which are at risk of being eliminated in this country. It is the rights of women - to have single sex spaces, single sex rape & domestic violence shelters, single sex prisons, single sex sport etc & the right & ability to fight sex discrimination - which are being put at risk by those who think a man with a male body is a woman just because he feels he is. This is nonsense on stilts & puts at risk not just women but all the other protected characteristics. Why can't a white person say they should be considered "black" or "disabled" if they feel they are? What do you think that will do to the rights of black people or the disabled if categories can be Id'd into at will?
Both the extreme transactivists & the anti-abortionists prefer ideology over physical biological reality. Both think they know better than women themselves what womanhood is & how women should live their lives. Both are sexist & misogynist. Both must be resisted. And those who wish to attack gay rights will find no stronger defender of those rights than me.
You’re ignoring my point.
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
Doesn’t that worry you?
This kind of emotional blackmail helps explain how things have become so toxic. What do you mean by 'eliminate'?
NB Cyclefree: I do find it interesting that you respond to my query not with a direct response but a Gish Gallop of whataboutism. Did you have that text to hand ready to post, or did you type it all out just for me?
Some of those points you make are false, some of them are true but irrelevant & some of them I actually agree with. But if I took the time to respond to every single point (and my, there were a lot of them) it would never end & the endless argumentation would end up with everyone having completely forgotten the original question. Which I guess was your goal in the first place.
But the point stands: These people are coming for you, if they can manage it. Distracting you with trans politics is just part of the game - trans people are a side issue for them, a tasty snack on the way to the main event & if you think you can get what you want by siding with them & not have that rebound on you & yours in deeply personal & awful ways in the future I would personally suggest that you’re sorely mistaken.
The question you should be asking yourself is: if feminists are prepared to side with these groups, how awful must the alternative be? Or, just how much of an immediate existential threat must the other side represent that feminists are willing to risk the longer term catastrophe that you can see coming so clearly?
NB Cyclefree: I do find it interesting that you respond to my query not with a direct response but a Gish Gallop of whataboutism. Did you have that text to hand ready to post, or did you type it all out just for me?
Some of those points you make are false, some of them are true but irrelevant & some of them I actually agree with. But if I took the time to respond to every single point (and my, there were a lot of them) it would never end & the endless argumentation would end up with everyone having completely forgotten the original question. Which I guess was your goal in the first place.
But the point stands: These people are coming for you, if they can manage it. Distracting you with trans politics is just part of the game - trans people are a side issue for them, a tasty snack on the way to the main event & if you think you can get what you want by siding with them & not have that rebound on you & yours in deeply personal & awful ways in the future I would personally suggest that you’re sorely mistaken.
I have responded directly by stating that yes I am worried, that I take care when looking at who is saying what about the issue and that, pedantic though it may make me, I look at what people actually say and write rather than what others say about them. I try and do my due diligence.
I would ask that you do the same about the people you are allying yourself with.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
How many of those have switched from saying it wouldn't happen to defending it ?
The stuff going on in America is just the product of extreme polarisation and best understood that way. Both sides (left and right) are extremely misguided and pursue insane policies and they goad each other in to more and more stupid policies. It is really a question of which dystopia is more benign, and for me at least it is a very difficult one to answer.
I think that’s wrong. We have one side plotting coups and almost succeeding, and with a large amount of supposedly ‘Moderate’ Republicans refusing to disavow a man and a movement that might very well succeed in not certifying an election in the future. That’s setting aside Roe v Wade.
Then we have another side who, depending on one’s point of view, might bang on too much about Trans people or Climate Change or whatever, but aren’t that dissimilar from the main UK parties economically, socially etc.
The US has a legitimacy crisis that is clearly being stoked by both sides. You need to take account of the whole spectrum of US politics rather than just treating mainstream Democrats as representative of the side opposing the extreme right.
Until Trump, though, the vast majority of both the Republican party and the Democratic one were prepared to accept the verdict of the voters.
And for all the fuss, they generally did. There was no attempt to overturn the result of the 2016 election.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
Haven't you noticed that it is Stonewall - very keen indeed on trans rights & self-ID in particular which has explicitly since 2015 been campaigning to remove existing sex-based exemptions benefiting women in the Equality Act? It also wants to abolish the crime of rape by deception.
A group which wants to do that is not on the side of women.
Haven't you noticed Scottish Ministers - currently campaigning to get self-ID in Scotland - citing Malta as one of the countries to be emulated because of their stance on this topic. This would be the Malta that has an absolute abortion ban & one of whose Ministers recently said that Maltese women who went abroad for abortion should be hunted down & punished.
Haven't you noticed the violence of transactivists (as in the recent demo in Bristol) attacking women, threatening them with violence, including sexual violence telling them to go home & look after their children? Haven't you noticed the number of people with sexual offences against women & children claiming to be trans demanding that women abandon their boundaries, which are there for their protection.
Haven't you noticed Stonewall attacking lesbians for not wanting to have sex with men with penises, calling them racists, similar to anti-semites or those who were pro-apartheid? Haven't you noticed Stonewall trying to redefine sexual orientation as gender orientation? How offensive & harmful to gay rights is that? My gay son is attracted to men with male bodies. Not to a woman who feels herself to be a man. But if he says that, transactivists will call him transphobic.
Trans people in the U.K. currently have exactly the same legal rights & protections under the Equality Act as other groups. I am glad of that. I will fight to stop anyone taking those away. I will fight for those with gender dysphoria to have the care & support they need.
But it is not trans rights which are at risk of being eliminated in this country. It is the rights of women - to have single sex spaces, single sex rape & domestic violence shelters, single sex prisons, single sex sport etc & the right & ability to fight sex discrimination - which are being put at risk by those who think a man with a male body is a woman just because he feels he is. This is nonsense on stilts & puts at risk not just women but all the other protected characteristics. Why can't a white person say they should be considered "black" or "disabled" if they feel they are? What do you think that will do to the rights of black people or the disabled if categories can be Id'd into at will?
Both the extreme transactivists & the anti-abortionists prefer ideology over physical biological reality. Both think they know better than women themselves what womanhood is & how women should live their lives. Both are sexist & misogynist. Both must be resisted. And those who wish to attack gay rights will find no stronger defender of those rights than me.
You’re ignoring my point.
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
Doesn’t that worry you?
The attacks on gay rights and on those with gender dysphoria and womens' rights does worry me. I am - unfashionable as it may be - strongly socially liberal.
But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides. In some cases, they are explicitly pro-paedophile and against boundaries. Does this not worry you? I have spelt out names. You have spoken in generalities.
I do not and will not ally myself with such people. I am not really an activist. But I can make myself clear and I can disassociate myself from and attack those who seek to push back on rights which I think civilised society should value.
What I am not going to do is keep quiet when I see existing rights for women under attack here.
Last year a U.K. court ruled that it was acceptable for a woman in prison to be raped if that was the price she had to pay to validate a trans identified male's feelings. I find that appalling, truly sickening. Single sex prisons were campaigned for by Elizabeth Fry in order to prevent the sexual exploitation of women in prisons. Now a century later we have gone backwards to preserve the rights of male sex offenders who - entirely coincidentally - claim to be women when they are caught and sentenced.
That is who you ally with - men who abuse trans rights to rape women. That this is happening in Britain today with scarcely a peep from anyone should sicken any decent person.
"But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides"
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
Stonehenge is fine but not really worth the cost for non EH members. Take headphones as the audio tour is now a phone app.
It depends what you're looking for but a tourist with a month here could do worse than take out a temporary EH and NT membership and just lap up the history across the country.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
I took the little 'un to Stonehenge three years ago, before Covid. He had just turned five, and had been interested in Stonehenge for a couple of years, had made models of it, read books (with help) on it, talked incessantly about it, made Close Encounters of the Third Kind style food models of it.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
Right now, all my little kid wants to do is go to Peppa Pig World, which she views as some sort of El Dorado.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
That's not a bad agenda at all.
The UK has so much wonderful stuff in it. We are truly blessed to live here.
NB Cyclefree: I do find it interesting that you respond to my query not with a direct response but a Gish Gallop of whataboutism. Did you have that text to hand ready to post, or did you type it all out just for me?
Some of those points you make are false, some of them are true but irrelevant & some of them I actually agree with. But if I took the time to respond to every single point (and my, there were a lot of them) it would never end & the endless argumentation would end up with everyone having completely forgotten the original question. Which I guess was your goal in the first place.
But the point stands: These people are coming for you, if they can manage it. Distracting you with trans politics is just part of the game - trans people are a side issue for them, a tasty snack on the way to the main event & if you think you can get what you want by siding with them & not have that rebound on you & yours in deeply personal & awful ways in the future I would personally suggest that you’re sorely mistaken.
Reading both your posts, I would categorise this debate in the same political space as how to resolve the mess over the NI protocol, or the Israel/Palestine conflict. People with strong views on either side find it very hard to debate with one another, in part because the root problem is so intractable.
NB Cyclefree: I do find it interesting that you respond to my query not with a direct response but a Gish Gallop of whataboutism. Did you have that text to hand ready to post, or did you type it all out just for me?
Some of those points you make are false, some of them are true but irrelevant & some of them I actually agree with. But if I took the time to respond to every single point (and my, there were a lot of them) it would never end & the endless argumentation would end up with everyone having completely forgotten the original question. Which I guess was your goal in the first place.
But the point stands: These people are coming for you, if they can manage it. Distracting you with trans politics is just part of the game - trans people are a side issue for them, a tasty snack on the way to the main event & if you think you can get what you want by siding with them & not have that rebound on you & yours in deeply personal & awful ways in the future I would personally suggest that you’re sorely mistaken.
In other words: it's much too hard work for you to respond to her argument so you're going to stick to ad hominem instead?
Did you count the number of assertions in that text? It would take days to go through each of them & give them the treatment they deserved.
But that’s the point of a Gish Gallop: to overwhelm with a flurry of assertions, knowing that the other party doesn’t have the time to refute (or even engage with) them all. You swamp the issue you don’t want to deal with a torrent of irrelevence, in the hope that the audience doesn’t notice.
You don't need to.
Just answer these questions:-
1. Name the Christo-fascist groups you say are seeking to eliminate trans people in the U.K.? 2. Name those GC feminists or feminist groups with whom they are in alliance? 3. Specify what that alliance consists of. 4. Set out the objectives they are seeking.
Since you made the allegations you should have no difficulty giving precise answers to these questions very quickly.
BTW I have to go off and do stuff now so will check in later.
Hmm, looking at flight tracker, there’s an emergency Thompson airlines Boeing 767 out of Manchester, currently holding in circles near Buxton. Hope it’s nothing too serious.
To Cape Verde, got to Llangollen before turning sharply back. How long to burn 6 hrs fuel before attempting a landing?
Btw, rain just stopped for the moment after ca. 40 mins.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
How many of those have switched from saying it wouldn't happen to defending it ?
The stuff going on in America is just the product of extreme polarisation and best understood that way. Both sides (left and right) are extremely misguided and pursue insane policies and they goad each other in to more and more stupid policies. It is really a question of which dystopia is more benign, and for me at least it is a very difficult one to answer.
I think that’s wrong. We have one side plotting coups and almost succeeding, and with a large amount of supposedly ‘Moderate’ Republicans refusing to disavow a man and a movement that might very well succeed in not certifying an election in the future. That’s setting aside Roe v Wade.
Then we have another side who, depending on one’s point of view, might bang on too much about Trans people or Climate Change or whatever, but aren’t that dissimilar from the main UK parties economically, socially etc.
The US has a legitimacy crisis that is clearly being stoked by both sides. You need to take account of the whole spectrum of US politics rather than just treating mainstream Democrats as representative of the side opposing the extreme right.
Until Trump, though, the vast majority of both the Republican party and the Democratic one were prepared to accept the verdict of the voters.
And for all the fuss, they generally did. There was no attempt to overturn the result of the 2016 election.
It was Bush v Gore in 2000 which really upset the apple cart.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
Haven't you noticed that it is Stonewall - very keen indeed on trans rights & self-ID in particular which has explicitly since 2015 been campaigning to remove existing sex-based exemptions benefiting women in the Equality Act? It also wants to abolish the crime of rape by deception.
A group which wants to do that is not on the side of women.
Haven't you noticed Scottish Ministers - currently campaigning to get self-ID in Scotland - citing Malta as one of the countries to be emulated because of their stance on this topic. This would be the Malta that has an absolute abortion ban & one of whose Ministers recently said that Maltese women who went abroad for abortion should be hunted down & punished.
Haven't you noticed the violence of transactivists (as in the recent demo in Bristol) attacking women, threatening them with violence, including sexual violence telling them to go home & look after their children? Haven't you noticed the number of people with sexual offences against women & children claiming to be trans demanding that women abandon their boundaries, which are there for their protection.
Haven't you noticed Stonewall attacking lesbians for not wanting to have sex with men with penises, calling them racists, similar to anti-semites or those who were pro-apartheid? Haven't you noticed Stonewall trying to redefine sexual orientation as gender orientation? How offensive & harmful to gay rights is that? My gay son is attracted to men with male bodies. Not to a woman who feels herself to be a man. But if he says that, transactivists will call him transphobic.
Trans people in the U.K. currently have exactly the same legal rights & protections under the Equality Act as other groups. I am glad of that. I will fight to stop anyone taking those away. I will fight for those with gender dysphoria to have the care & support they need.
But it is not trans rights which are at risk of being eliminated in this country. It is the rights of women - to have single sex spaces, single sex rape & domestic violence shelters, single sex prisons, single sex sport etc & the right & ability to fight sex discrimination - which are being put at risk by those who think a man with a male body is a woman just because he feels he is. This is nonsense on stilts & puts at risk not just women but all the other protected characteristics. Why can't a white person say they should be considered "black" or "disabled" if they feel they are? What do you think that will do to the rights of black people or the disabled if categories can be Id'd into at will?
Both the extreme transactivists & the anti-abortionists prefer ideology over physical biological reality. Both think they know better than women themselves what womanhood is & how women should live their lives. Both are sexist & misogynist. Both must be resisted. And those who wish to attack gay rights will find no stronger defender of those rights than me.
You’re ignoring my point.
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
Doesn’t that worry you?
The attacks on gay rights and on those with gender dysphoria and womens' rights does worry me. I am - unfashionable as it may be - strongly socially liberal.
But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides. In some cases, they are explicitly pro-paedophile and against boundaries. Does this not worry you? I have spelt out names. You have spoken in generalities.
I do not and will not ally myself with such people. I am not really an activist. But I can make myself clear and I can disassociate myself from and attack those who seek to push back on rights which I think civilised society should value.
What I am not going to do is keep quiet when I see existing rights for women under attack here.
Last year a U.K. court ruled that it was acceptable for a woman in prison to be raped if that was the price she had to pay to validate a trans identified male's feelings. I find that appalling, truly sickening. Single sex prisons were campaigned for by Elizabeth Fry in order to prevent the sexual exploitation of women in prisons. Now a century later we have gone backwards to preserve the rights of male sex offenders who - entirely coincidentally - claim to be women when they are caught and sentenced.
That is who you ally with - men who abuse trans rights to rape women. That this is happening in Britain today with scarcely a peep from anyone should sicken any decent person.
Ah, we’ve moved on to the “trans women are sexual deviants who are coming for your children” part of the argument.
Lovely.
If you’re going to reference court cases, at least give a proper reference so I can read the judgement.
(As I understand things the prison estate has what seems to me to be entirely sensible rules: trans women, due in no small part to their own vulnerability, go in the female estate unless they have a history of sexual violence, in which case they are put in appropriate secure accommodation, I think always in the male estate but I’d have to go back to the relavant documents to check. This policy was set up after some deeply awful failures where women were sexually assaulted by sociopaths who had been put into the female estate after identifying as female. That should never have hapenned & was a terrible failure of the system.)
Once again, I must ask you: have you not noticed that the framing of LGBTQ people as “groomers” and deviants is coming from the right? It’s absolutely all over alt-right media right now & is being used to stir up violence against LGBTQ people of all stripes.
Your depiction of trans activists as “pro-peadaphile” seems to be in line with this more general attack line. Can you give actual recent quotes? Sources? Because it’s not something that I have seen anywhere personally.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
That's not a very relaxing itinerary.
You do get to see Cambridge's small business parks though and eat Co-Op Sandwiches on a park bench. Whats not to love?!
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
Haven't you noticed that it is Stonewall - very keen indeed on trans rights & self-ID in particular which has explicitly since 2015 been campaigning to remove existing sex-based exemptions benefiting women in the Equality Act? It also wants to abolish the crime of rape by deception.
A group which wants to do that is not on the side of women.
Haven't you noticed Scottish Ministers - currently campaigning to get self-ID in Scotland - citing Malta as one of the countries to be emulated because of their stance on this topic. This would be the Malta that has an absolute abortion ban & one of whose Ministers recently said that Maltese women who went abroad for abortion should be hunted down & punished.
Haven't you noticed the violence of transactivists (as in the recent demo in Bristol) attacking women, threatening them with violence, including sexual violence telling them to go home & look after their children? Haven't you noticed the number of people with sexual offences against women & children claiming to be trans demanding that women abandon their boundaries, which are there for their protection.
Haven't you noticed Stonewall attacking lesbians for not wanting to have sex with men with penises, calling them racists, similar to anti-semites or those who were pro-apartheid? Haven't you noticed Stonewall trying to redefine sexual orientation as gender orientation? How offensive & harmful to gay rights is that? My gay son is attracted to men with male bodies. Not to a woman who feels herself to be a man. But if he says that, transactivists will call him transphobic.
Trans people in the U.K. currently have exactly the same legal rights & protections under the Equality Act as other groups. I am glad of that. I will fight to stop anyone taking those away. I will fight for those with gender dysphoria to have the care & support they need.
But it is not trans rights which are at risk of being eliminated in this country. It is the rights of women - to have single sex spaces, single sex rape & domestic violence shelters, single sex prisons, single sex sport etc & the right & ability to fight sex discrimination - which are being put at risk by those who think a man with a male body is a woman just because he feels he is. This is nonsense on stilts & puts at risk not just women but all the other protected characteristics. Why can't a white person say they should be considered "black" or "disabled" if they feel they are? What do you think that will do to the rights of black people or the disabled if categories can be Id'd into at will?
Both the extreme transactivists & the anti-abortionists prefer ideology over physical biological reality. Both think they know better than women themselves what womanhood is & how women should live their lives. Both are sexist & misogynist. Both must be resisted. And those who wish to attack gay rights will find no stronger defender of those rights than me.
You’re ignoring my point.
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
Doesn’t that worry you?
The attacks on gay rights and on those with gender dysphoria and womens' rights does worry me. I am - unfashionable as it may be - strongly socially liberal.
But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides. In some cases, they are explicitly pro-paedophile and against boundaries. Does this not worry you? I have spelt out names. You have spoken in generalities.
I do not and will not ally myself with such people. I am not really an activist. But I can make myself clear and I can disassociate myself from and attack those who seek to push back on rights which I think civilised society should value.
What I am not going to do is keep quiet when I see existing rights for women under attack here.
Last year a U.K. court ruled that it was acceptable for a woman in prison to be raped if that was the price she had to pay to validate a trans identified male's feelings. I find that appalling, truly sickening. Single sex prisons were campaigned for by Elizabeth Fry in order to prevent the sexual exploitation of women in prisons. Now a century later we have gone backwards to preserve the rights of male sex offenders who - entirely coincidentally - claim to be women when they are caught and sentenced.
That is who you ally with - men who abuse trans rights to rape women. That this is happening in Britain today with scarcely a peep from anyone should sicken any decent person.
"But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides"
No. Just no.
Agreed.
Stupidest post I've ever seen on political betting from @Cyclefree of all people.
I remember all of this crap over gay people: how they were basically closet paedophiles. My brother wasn't trusted with children. Unbelievable with hindsight.
Cyclefree of ALL people should know that you don't build law around a few rotten apples. So I'll state it quite simply: stop being a moron.
Trans people need protecting every bit as much as other LBGQ people, arguably all the more so at the moment given the vile invective from those on the far right.
Much more of that kind of trans hate and I shall cease being on pb.com. I don't need to read that kind of hate-filled nonsense. If I did, I could go and follow Piers Morgan, Katie Hopkins and Laurence Fox. Tells you everything you need to know.
p.s. I was raped by a teacher who happened to be a married man. He was sent to prison. It severely affected me but I'm not so stupid as to think that means all male teachers are bad people out to rape girls (or boys) any more than a trans person is.
Hmm, looking at flight tracker, there’s an emergency Thompson airlines Boeing 767 out of Manchester, currently holding in circles near Buxton. Hope it’s nothing too serious.
So there is. Burning fuel, waiting for an external inspection, or an incident on board?
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
I'll have to try the night out in Peckham some time.
Hmm, looking at flight tracker, there’s an emergency Thompson airlines Boeing 767 out of Manchester, currently holding in circles near Buxton. Hope it’s nothing too serious.
To Cape Verde, got to Llangollen before turning sharply back. How long to burn 6 hrs fuel before attempting a landing?
Btw, rain just stopped for the moment after ca. 40 mins.
He’s done I think 16 ‘laps’ of Buxton so far, in an hour and a half. Fuel jettison equipment was optional on 767, maybe this one doesn’t have it or it’s not working.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
I took the little 'un to Stonehenge three years ago, before Covid. He had just turned five, and had been interested in Stonehenge for a couple of years, had made models of it, read books (with help) on it, talked incessantly about it, made Close Encounters of the Third Kind style food models of it.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
Right now, all my little kid wants to do is go to Peppa Pig World, which she views as some sort of El Dorado.
On the same trip as Stonehenge, we stayed for a few days in Southampton and did Southampton / Portsmouth. Some other families staying our hotel were visiting Peppa Pig World. When another child said they'd been, he just said: "I went on a warship!"
I was relieved, as I feared he'd want me to take him ...
(Gulliver's Land is great fun, though I think they're all a little far north for you.)
Precious few from overseas ever visit Northumberland. That's why our superb beaches are blissfully empty and the economy moribund.
We went last year; stayed near Bamburgh. Beautiful beach, fascinating area. Like Co.Durham too.
Yeah. We get loads of UK tourism, and most welcome it is too. However, it seems not to be on the radar at all for foreign visitors. I mean. If you like old things, we've more castles than you can shake a stick at.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
I took the little 'un to Stonehenge three years ago, before Covid. He had just turned five, and had been interested in Stonehenge for a couple of years, had made models of it, read books (with help) on it, talked incessantly about it, made Close Encounters of the Third Kind style food models of it.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
Right now, all my little kid wants to do is go to Peppa Pig World, which she views as some sort of El Dorado.
If its good enough for Bozo the clown - it's good enough for your child.
Being honest though if it's where they want to spend a while it will be brilliant fun...
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
You know when a country is going to the dogs, when all and sundry are demanding more money from the government, and the government is already mired in debt.
Ah, we’ve moved on to the “trans women are sexual deviants who are coming for your children” part of the argument..
I think @Cyclefree and JK Rowling have a particular problem with the only requirement for biological men to access women only spaces being self identification.
Now, I don't think it's an outrageous to worry that some predatory men might... you know... lie to access female only spaces.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
That's not a bad agenda at all.
The UK has so much wonderful stuff in it. We are truly blessed to live here.
I mean it comes down to what interests you. No Lakes, Broads, Ness, no Stratford, no Dartmoor or Exmoor, no Ironbridge. But plastic sandwiches in a shitty London park. You cant do the UK in 7 days so do one part thoroughly
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
I'll have to try the night out in Peckham some time.
I'm genuinely interested to learn why that's different to, say, a night out in Catford.
Precious few from overseas ever visit Northumberland. That's why our superb beaches are blissfully empty and the economy moribund.
We went last year; stayed near Bamburgh. Beautiful beach, fascinating area. Like Co.Durham too.
Yeah. We get loads of UK tourism, and most welcome it is too. However, it seems not to be on the radar at all for foreign visitors. I mean. If you like old things, we've more castles than you can shake a stick at.
I was a bit disappointed in Beamish though. That was probably due to the fact that I couldn't walk.
Hmm, looking at flight tracker, there’s an emergency Thompson airlines Boeing 767 out of Manchester, currently holding in circles near Buxton. Hope it’s nothing too serious.
So there is. Burning fuel, waiting for an external inspection, or an incident on board?
The passengers must be getting dizzy.
Reminded me of this one from a few years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9KhZwsYtNDE A Thompson 757 out of Manchester, with a bird strike into the engine on takeoff. An example of textbook use of the radio by the Captain, in training courses.
If today’s incident were a serious emergency, they’d have landed straight back overweight, so my guess is a minor emergency for this one - perhaps a hydraulic problem, or the gear/flaps didn’t go up properly.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
I took the little 'un to Stonehenge three years ago, before Covid. He had just turned five, and had been interested in Stonehenge for a couple of years, had made models of it, read books (with help) on it, talked incessantly about it, made Close Encounters of the Third Kind style food models of it.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
I can only faintly remember it but (just) belong to the generation where you could turn up at Stonehenge and wander round.
For something like it in atmosphere, though not amazingness, try Castlerigg Stone Circle, with a world class setting.
This kind of emotional blackmail helps explain how things have become so toxic. What do you mean by 'eliminate'?
Would this qualify?
Chimene Suleyman@chimenesuleyman 3 Jun “[Trans people] are a huge problem to a sane world… Every one of them is a difficulty… they’re going to need things the rest of us don’t need… so the fewer of those people there are the better.” Helen Joyce literally advocating eugenics. Dear god.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
I'll have to try the night out in Peckham some time.
I'm genuinely interested to learn why that's different to, say, a night out in Catford.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
Haven't you noticed that it is Stonewall - very keen indeed on trans rights & self-ID in particular which has explicitly since 2015 been campaigning to remove existing sex-based exemptions benefiting women in the Equality Act? It also wants to abolish the crime of rape by deception.
A group which wants to do that is not on the side of women.
Haven't you noticed Scottish Ministers - currently campaigning to get self-ID in Scotland - citing Malta as one of the countries to be emulated because of their stance on this topic. This would be the Malta that has an absolute abortion ban & one of whose Ministers recently said that Maltese women who went abroad for abortion should be hunted down & punished.
Haven't you noticed the violence of transactivists (as in the recent demo in Bristol) attacking women, threatening them with violence, including sexual violence telling them to go home & look after their children? Haven't you noticed the number of people with sexual offences against women & children claiming to be trans demanding that women abandon their boundaries, which are there for their protection.
Haven't you noticed Stonewall attacking lesbians for not wanting to have sex with men with penises, calling them racists, similar to anti-semites or those who were pro-apartheid? Haven't you noticed Stonewall trying to redefine sexual orientation as gender orientation? How offensive & harmful to gay rights is that? My gay son is attracted to men with male bodies. Not to a woman who feels herself to be a man. But if he says that, transactivists will call him transphobic.
Trans people in the U.K. currently have exactly the same legal rights & protections under the Equality Act as other groups. I am glad of that. I will fight to stop anyone taking those away. I will fight for those with gender dysphoria to have the care & support they need.
But it is not trans rights which are at risk of being eliminated in this country. It is the rights of women - to have single sex spaces, single sex rape & domestic violence shelters, single sex prisons, single sex sport etc & the right & ability to fight sex discrimination - which are being put at risk by those who think a man with a male body is a woman just because he feels he is. This is nonsense on stilts & puts at risk not just women but all the other protected characteristics. Why can't a white person say they should be considered "black" or "disabled" if they feel they are? What do you think that will do to the rights of black people or the disabled if categories can be Id'd into at will?
Both the extreme transactivists & the anti-abortionists prefer ideology over physical biological reality. Both think they know better than women themselves what womanhood is & how women should live their lives. Both are sexist & misogynist. Both must be resisted. And those who wish to attack gay rights will find no stronger defender of those rights than me.
You’re ignoring my point.
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
Doesn’t that worry you?
This kind of emotional blackmail helps explain how things have become so toxic. What do you mean by 'eliminate'?
This particular argument seems to be that there are nasty people A who will get behind argument B because they really want C, therefore it is wrong for anyone else to support argument B as it is 'aligning' with A.
Yes, one can be a bit worried if some horrible people fall on the same side as ourselves for once, but it doesn't mean the more limited case we are putting (whatever the topic) is entirely contaminated by loose association.
I agree broadly with cyclefree on this subject, but I think she does go over the line every now and then on the motivations of trans activisits.
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
Given this Government has spent 12 years cutting legal aid expenditure to the absolute bone I can't see things changing.
What I suspect will actually happen is that more and more criminal barristers will either join the CPS (for a steady wage) or switch to doing something else. A Barista at Nero / Starbucks earns more with way less stress.
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
I took the little 'un to Stonehenge three years ago, before Covid. He had just turned five, and had been interested in Stonehenge for a couple of years, had made models of it, read books (with help) on it, talked incessantly about it, made Close Encounters of the Third Kind style food models of it.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
I can only faintly remember it but (just) belong to the generation where you could turn up at Stonehenge and wander round.
For something like it in atmosphere, though not amazingness, try Castlerigg Stone Circle, with a world class setting.
Ah, we’ve moved on to the “trans women are sexual deviants who are coming for your children” part of the argument..
I think @Cyclefree and JK Rowling have a particular problem with the only requirement for biological men to access women only spaces being self identification.
Now, I don't think it's an outrageous to worry that some predatory men might... you know... lie to access female only spaces.
Does that sound like a ridiculous concern?
Yes.
Plenty of women have been assaulted in the Ladies Loo by men who were definitely not identifying as women. It has happened for years if not decades. Heck even Tom Cruise followed Kelly McGillis into the Ladies in Top Gun to pester her verbally.
Women have been beaten in toilets, assaulted in toilets, filming urinating in toilets (spycams) and none of it was done by "men identifiying as women".
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
I took the little 'un to Stonehenge three years ago, before Covid. He had just turned five, and had been interested in Stonehenge for a couple of years, had made models of it, read books (with help) on it, talked incessantly about it, made Close Encounters of the Third Kind style food models of it.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
I can only faintly remember it but (just) belong to the generation where you could turn up at Stonehenge and wander round.
For something like it in atmosphere, though not amazingness, try Castlerigg Stone Circle, with a world class setting.
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
Given this Government has spent 12 years cutting legal aid expenditure to the absolute bone I can't see things changing.
What I suspect will actually happen is that more and more criminal barristers will either join the CPS (for a steady wage) or switch to doing something else. A Barista at Nero / Starbucks earns more with way less stress.
Whilst I generally liked the Coalition, this area was definitely one they messed up, and knowingly so I fear. It's an easy thing to sell, cutting legal aid, even though as far as I can see it only makes things worse for everyone, including the government.
A government looking to shore up support among its base is not going to be proposing reversing legal aid cuts.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
I took the little 'un to Stonehenge three years ago, before Covid. He had just turned five, and had been interested in Stonehenge for a couple of years, had made models of it, read books (with help) on it, talked incessantly about it, made Close Encounters of the Third Kind style food models of it.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
I can only faintly remember it but (just) belong to the generation where you could turn up at Stonehenge and wander round.
For something like it in atmosphere, though not amazingness, try Castlerigg Stone Circle, with a world class setting.
I'll have to go there, thanks. I love Avebury (which others have mentioned), and my favourite stone circle is the tiny but atmospheric Nine Ladies in the Peak District. But I'd also like to give an honourable mention to Kilmartin on the west coast of Scotland, which had loads of stones.
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
Given this Government has spent 12 years cutting legal aid expenditure to the absolute bone I can't see things changing.
What I suspect will actually happen is that more and more criminal barristers will either join the CPS (for a steady wage) or switch to doing something else. A Barista at Nero / Starbucks earns more with way less stress.
Whilst I generally liked the Coalition, this area was definitely one they messed up, and knowingly so I fear. It's an easy thing to sell, cutting legal aid, even though as far as I can see it only makes things worse for everyone, including the government.
A government looking to shore up support among its base is not going to be proposing reversing legal aid cuts.
Yep but without it we are going to go into the next election without a fair criminal justice system...
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
You know when a country is going to the dogs, when all and sundry are demanding more money from the government, and the government is already mired in debt.
Well, this is an area where the money spent would be quite effective in improving matters, at what is for government levels very little. So it would probably lead to noticable improvement at little cost.
I don't want governments to be absurdly profligate either, but they are not meant to be the equivalent of those parish councils who have a minuscule precept they never raise as if that is their sole function, then moan they cannot do things.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
Or you could do amazing stuff and go home to USA and find no-one else has done it, or heard of most of it.
Walk the City of London for a couple of days, but miss St Paul's and Tower. Stamford Boston Lincoln Cathedral etc Stow Walpole St Peter Walk old Norwich for a day Edington Priory Bradford on Avon St Lawrence Selby Abbey Durham Stirling (be selective)
A bit ecclesiastical, but lots of pubs in between.
Ah, we’ve moved on to the “trans women are sexual deviants who are coming for your children” part of the argument..
I think @Cyclefree and JK Rowling have a particular problem with the only requirement for biological men to access women only spaces being self identification.
Now, I don't think it's an outrageous to worry that some predatory men might... you know... lie to access female only spaces.
Does that sound like a ridiculous concern?
Yes.
Plenty of women have been assaulted in the Ladies Loo by men who were definitely not identifying as women. It has happened for years if not decades. Heck even Tom Cruise followed Kelly McGillis into the Ladies in Top Gun to pester her verbally.
Women have been beaten in toilets, assaulted in toilets, filming urinating in toilets (spycams) and none of it was done by "men identifiying as women".
And an important question: who polices this? Will women be challenged because someone thought they had an Adam's Apple? That their voice was too deep? How would a no-trans-in-womens-toilets law be policed?
Abusers need to be targeted, not trans people. Unless we are to take it that all trans people are, or might be, abusers?
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
Haven't you noticed that it is Stonewall - very keen indeed on trans rights & self-ID in particular which has explicitly since 2015 been campaigning to remove existing sex-based exemptions benefiting women in the Equality Act? It also wants to abolish the crime of rape by deception.
A group which wants to do that is not on the side of women.
Haven't you noticed Scottish Ministers - currently campaigning to get self-ID in Scotland - citing Malta as one of the countries to be emulated because of their stance on this topic. This would be the Malta that has an absolute abortion ban & one of whose Ministers recently said that Maltese women who went abroad for abortion should be hunted down & punished.
Haven't you noticed the violence of transactivists (as in the recent demo in Bristol) attacking women, threatening them with violence, including sexual violence telling them to go home & look after their children? Haven't you noticed the number of people with sexual offences against women & children claiming to be trans demanding that women abandon their boundaries, which are there for their protection.
Haven't you noticed Stonewall attacking lesbians for not wanting to have sex with men with penises, calling them racists, similar to anti-semites or those who were pro-apartheid? Haven't you noticed Stonewall trying to redefine sexual orientation as gender orientation? How offensive & harmful to gay rights is that? My gay son is attracted to men with male bodies. Not to a woman who feels herself to be a man. But if he says that, transactivists will call him transphobic.
Trans people in the U.K. currently have exactly the same legal rights & protections under the Equality Act as other groups. I am glad of that. I will fight to stop anyone taking those away. I will fight for those with gender dysphoria to have the care & support they need.
But it is not trans rights which are at risk of being eliminated in this country. It is the rights of women - to have single sex spaces, single sex rape & domestic violence shelters, single sex prisons, single sex sport etc & the right & ability to fight sex discrimination - which are being put at risk by those who think a man with a male body is a woman just because he feels he is. This is nonsense on stilts & puts at risk not just women but all the other protected characteristics. Why can't a white person say they should be considered "black" or "disabled" if they feel they are? What do you think that will do to the rights of black people or the disabled if categories can be Id'd into at will?
Both the extreme transactivists & the anti-abortionists prefer ideology over physical biological reality. Both think they know better than women themselves what womanhood is & how women should live their lives. Both are sexist & misogynist. Both must be resisted. And those who wish to attack gay rights will find no stronger defender of those rights than me.
You’re ignoring my point.
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
Doesn’t that worry you?
The attacks on gay rights and on those with gender dysphoria and womens' rights does worry me. I am - unfashionable as it may be - strongly socially liberal.
But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides. In some cases, they are explicitly pro-paedophile and against boundaries. Does this not worry you? I have spelt out names. You have spoken in generalities.
I do not and will not ally myself with such people. I am not really an activist. But I can make myself clear and I can disassociate myself from and attack those who seek to push back on rights which I think civilised society should value.
What I am not going to do is keep quiet when I see existing rights for women under attack here.
Last year a U.K. court ruled that it was acceptable for a woman in prison to be raped if that was the price she had to pay to validate a trans identified male's feelings. I find that appalling, truly sickening. Single sex prisons were campaigned for by Elizabeth Fry in order to prevent the sexual exploitation of women in prisons. Now a century later we have gone backwards to preserve the rights of male sex offenders who - entirely coincidentally - claim to be women when they are caught and sentenced.
That is who you ally with - men who abuse trans rights to rape women. That this is happening in Britain today with scarcely a peep from anyone should sicken any decent person.
"But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides"
No. Just no.
Agreed.
Stupidest post I've ever seen on political betting from @Cyclefree of all people.
I remember all of this crap over gay people: how they were basically closet paedophiles. My brother wasn't trusted with children. Unbelievable with hindsight.
Cyclefree of ALL people should know that you don't build law around a few rotten apples. So I'll state it quite simply: stop being a moron.
Trans people need protecting every bit as much as other LBGQ people, arguably all the more so at the moment given the vile invective from those on the far right.
Much more of that kind of trans hate and I shall cease being on pb.com. I don't need to read that kind of hate-filled nonsense. If I did, I could go and follow Piers Morgan, Katie Hopkins and Laurence Fox. Tells you everything you need to know.
p.s. I was raped by a teacher who happened to be a married man. He was sent to prison. It severely affected me but I'm not so stupid as to think that means all male teachers are bad people out to rape girls (or boys) any more than a trans person is.
Actually Cyclefree of all people probably knows you DO build law around rotten apples.
That's literally the point of most law and safeguarding, to protect people from the rotten apples.
Trans people need protections but NOT in a way that violates women's protections.
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
Given this Government has spent 12 years cutting legal aid expenditure to the absolute bone I can't see things changing.
What I suspect will actually happen is that more and more criminal barristers will either join the CPS (for a steady wage) or switch to doing something else. A Barista at Nero / Starbucks earns more with way less stress.
Whilst I generally liked the Coalition, this area was definitely one they messed up, and knowingly so I fear. It's an easy thing to sell, cutting legal aid, even though as far as I can see it only makes things worse for everyone, including the government.
A government looking to shore up support among its base is not going to be proposing reversing legal aid cuts.
Yep but without it we are going to go into the next election without a fair criminal justice system...
I think that was already a given. Question is will any new incoming government even attempt to fix it, or will it fall down the list of priorities?
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
The article suggests the average plumber now earns £350 a day compared to £250 for 13 hours' work for the average legal aid lawyer
Ah, we’ve moved on to the “trans women are sexual deviants who are coming for your children” part of the argument..
I think @Cyclefree and JK Rowling have a particular problem with the only requirement for biological men to access women only spaces being self identification.
Now, I don't think it's an outrageous to worry that some predatory men might... you know... lie to access female only spaces.
Does that sound like a ridiculous concern?
Yes.
Plenty of women have been assaulted in the Ladies Loo by men who were definitely not identifying as women. It has happened for years if not decades. Heck even Tom Cruise followed Kelly McGillis into the Ladies in Top Gun to pester her verbally.
Women have been beaten in toilets, assaulted in toilets, filming urinating in toilets (spycams) and none of it was done by "men identifiying as women".
In that case, why have women only spaces at all? If people with penises are allowed to enter them, why have them?
This kind of emotional blackmail helps explain how things have become so toxic. What do you mean by 'eliminate'?
Would this qualify?
Chimene Suleyman@chimenesuleyman 3 Jun “[Trans people] are a huge problem to a sane world… Every one of them is a difficulty… they’re going to need things the rest of us don’t need… so the fewer of those people there are the better.” Helen Joyce literally advocating eugenics. Dear god.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
7 days is a very short time for something like this. Night out in Peckham seems a bit err.. parochial..
If I was to change your schedule but keep the broad theme I'd go Buck Palace and Windsor castle for day 2
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
Given this Government has spent 12 years cutting legal aid expenditure to the absolute bone I can't see things changing.
What I suspect will actually happen is that more and more criminal barristers will either join the CPS (for a steady wage) or switch to doing something else. A Barista at Nero / Starbucks earns more with way less stress.
Whilst I generally liked the Coalition, this area was definitely one they messed up, and knowingly so I fear. It's an easy thing to sell, cutting legal aid, even though as far as I can see it only makes things worse for everyone, including the government.
A government looking to shore up support among its base is not going to be proposing reversing legal aid cuts.
The problem for this government is that it continues to shore up an ever diminishing base. At some point, and on some issues, it has to begin reaching out to the other two thirds. Right now the train workers are receiving a surprising amount of public support. Next up will be teachers. Then the NHS. There is no semblance of a plan anywhere. Other than No! I've said it before and will say it again. 5% across the board in the Public Sector could be agreed tomorrow. And it can't be inflationary as it is below inflation. A pay increase below inflation is not unreasonable.
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
I really don't think Stonehenge is shit. The new museum is great and the restored landscape is also good. Yes you can't directly approach the stones, but that's mainly because people are dicks and would vandalise. I'd advise visiting early.
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
I took the little 'un to Stonehenge three years ago, before Covid. He had just turned five, and had been interested in Stonehenge for a couple of years, had made models of it, read books (with help) on it, talked incessantly about it, made Close Encounters of the Third Kind style food models of it.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
I can only faintly remember it but (just) belong to the generation where you could turn up at Stonehenge and wander round.
For something like it in atmosphere, though not amazingness, try Castlerigg Stone Circle, with a world class setting.
I'll have to go there, thanks. I love Avebury (which others have mentioned), and my favourite stone circle is the tiny but atmospheric Nine Ladies in the Peak District. But I'd also like to give an honourable mention to Kilmartin on the west coast of Scotland, which had loads of stones.
And I'd love to go to Callinish.
Callinish is what Stonehenge should be. Uncrowded, and you can walk amongst the stones. Do go when you can.
I quite like the Welsh dolmens. Pentre Ifan is the classic one, and you can spend a good while there with it all to yourself, but there are many others.
The two most important decisions made in recent decades by the Supreme Court are the National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka Obamacare) and the reversal of Roe. In both, the court chose to defer to elected legislatures; in both Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority.
I see a consistency in his deference that others may not. I do think that any fair-minded person will find his long legal career impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts
(Incidentally, some analysts think that Obama could have done better politically by putting economic recovery ahead of Obamacare, rather than the other way around. He certainly could have done better, long term, had he been willing to listen to Republicans in his first months in office.)
I broadly agree with you.
While I think that abortion (up until a point, obviously) should be legal, I also think that it is the job of legislators to make that decision not members of the Supreme Court. And yes, I realise that will have some shitty consequences for women. But in total, that harm is less bad than allowing judges to make law.
That, of course, leads me to be very rude about the Supreme Court overturning New York's century old law on concealed carry permits.
It is far from clear to me - or to lawyers or Supreme Courts over the last 100 years - that the law was in any way in conflict with:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Yes abortion should be decided at state level in the US, as should gay marriage and gun control. Just as the US SC also agreed the large expansion in Medicaid proposed by Obamacare should be up to the states.
Really in the US the Federal government should mainly be there for foreign policy and defence and Federal Crimes and Security and the tax to fund that
From a technical perspective, gay marriage is harder.
If gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, and a married couple move to Utah where it is not, do spousal benefits continue?
When there have been these muttering about prevention people leaving their home state (or helping someone to leave) for the purposes of procuring an abortion I always assumed that would break interstate commerce rules and therefore be up to Congress?
The personal right to interstate travel is an unenumerated right under current readings of the Constitution - which is why Kavanaugh felt it necessary to mention it in his concurrence. That the rest of the majority did not leaves some uncertainty as to how they would rule if it came before the court.
This has the potential to accelerate the process of rupture just as the equivalent Dred Scott ruling did in the case of slavery. Dred Scott effectively extended slavery in the free states, and banning interstate travel for abortion makes abortion illegal in the free states.
That’s clearly not the case. It makes it less economic (possibly, although I suspect that interstate abortions were a small proportion and so are probably an economic upside). It might cause an issue for some clinics built on, say, the border between states with the intention of serving customers from a state where it is illegal.
But, in any event, I am sure that a pregnant woman wishing to travel can find a cathedral she wishes to visit in another state.
For now. But if you listen to both the politicians in these shitkicker states and the people who vote for them, I can't see that freedom being allowed for long. These disgusting shameful women are breaking God's law. They can't be allowed to go and commit murder. If some of them still want to go then perhaps we can't trust women at all. Some kind of travel restriction once they are officially pregnant would be in order...
So a female executive can not longer travel on business. That’s where interstate commerce comes into play.
Which interferes with shitkicker states rights to enslave their womenfolk. Expect another SC ruling to throw cold water on their rights to travel if it is suspected that they are doing so to commit acts (brutal murder) which are illegal in the state they reside in.
I may sound over the top. But not in the context of what states are already doing. Gilead is forming.
Nah, you just sound over the top
I'd say RP's post paints a bleak picture. But far from an unrealistic one.
A while back, someone posted a link to a PB discussion from 2016, when people were arguing about whether Trump's election would cause rights to be reversed. Many posters thought it did not.
And yet, due to Trump and the Republicans' work, rights are being reversed.
The question is when that reversal will stop.
Yes indeed. Whilst many situations don't go from bad to worse to even worse, it is foolish simply to suggest that it won't happen.
Of all the accounts of 1930s history I have read or watched, Klemperer's first volume of diaries made a big impression, because they are entirely contemporaneous and not later edited. As each relatively petty restriction was imposed on the Jewish population, he and his acquaintances display the full range of familiar arguments about how the bad situation will only be temporary or sure to be reversed or won't go any further ("what more could they do?"), and amid his reported conversations there are some stunning anecdotes such as the Jewish person arguing they should support Hitler because if he is replaced they could get someone worse. As the reader you know how the story ends and feel like shouting at the characters in the book for being in such stunning denial.
There is of course no connection between this scenario and the one on topic, except that we should always remember that very bad outcomes - although very unlikely - are not impossible, and that if they are coming very few of us are likely to see it, even if with hindsight it will seem so obvious that one step will lead to the next.
Societal change - even massive change - always starts with a few small acts which then snowball into bigger and bigger acts until people ask "how did we get here".
Overturning Roe isn't THE big event in itself - though it is a very big marker that has just been erased. It is an enabling act for shitkickers to go and do what they believe to be right and just.
In a single judgement it has lined up the two sides in the coming civil war. In the 1860s the totem was slavery - though the driver was state's rights. In the 2020s the totem is abortion - though the driver is state's rights. There was no way that America could fall apart into a war to defend something most of the civilised world had declared unacceptable. Until it happened. And here we are again. It is "over the top" to point to the increasingly bellicose language *and actions* of these states.
Until it happens. Then "how did we get here" again.
Forcing a women to carry and give birth to a child against her will - with all the risks associated with pregnancy and birth - then force her to either look after a child she did not want or abandon it seems like a form of slavery to me. Giving a child up for adoption is not of course like slavery but the emotional impact of it on a woman is no small thing either.
I understand the views of those who have a care for the unborn child. But to be so callous about and indifferent to a real life living woman is chilling. It can often feel as if the drive to ban abortion is motivated by hatred of women rather than care for her and her unborn child. If it were otherwise, those agitating for no abortion would be pouring money and effort into helping women and children at birth and in those early years. But they aren't are they?
Offred in a Handmaid's tale: "I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off."
I fear people will start to quote that book in the same way we find so many acute observations in 1984.
There's a tendency to say that women are overreacting, that polls show abortion to be popular or at least wanted, that democracy will assert itself etc. That response can sometimes veer perilously close to a "calm down dear, you're being hysterical" one.
But let's look at the world around us - the rights of women in Iran and Afghanistan have gone backwards. In Poland too. In Malta they are awful. In this country there is a well-funded lobbying group which has been explicitly campaigning since 2015 to remove all sex-based exemptions benefiting women from the Equality Act.
Cyclefree: I have to ask this, because I think it’s important. Have you not noticed that the main group of people campaigning alongside you for you soi-disant “sex-based rights” are exactly the same groups who are plotted the end of Roe-vs-Wade in the USA?
A number of prominent GC figures have been explicit about this: they‘d throw women’s right to abortion in this country away if it meant winning in their campaigns against trans rights.
It seems to me very clear that the groups going after trans women for culture-war reasons are exactly the same as the ones going after women’s rights like access to abortion & contraception. I would be very, very concerned if I were you that I was going to win my war on trans women only to turn around and discover that I had (perhaps without realising it) sacrificed every right women had so painfully gained in the C20th along the way, because I had sided with the christo-fascists in order to get what I wanted.
Because the christo-fascists aren’t stopping here. They’re coming for all of it, if they have their way.
Fantasy analysis, completely misjudging British culture and politics. The main group in the UK who have dared to take on the extremist Trans activists are committed feminists. The christo-fascists bogeymen/women/other simply have no leverage or support in mainland Britain and not much in NI. I think your attempt to import or project into Britain the worst excesses of US politics is misguided and if it has any effect it will be a negative one. One more atom of online polarisation and debasement of debate.
Haven't you noticed that it is Stonewall - very keen indeed on trans rights & self-ID in particular which has explicitly since 2015 been campaigning to remove existing sex-based exemptions benefiting women in the Equality Act? It also wants to abolish the crime of rape by deception.
A group which wants to do that is not on the side of women.
Haven't you noticed Scottish Ministers - currently campaigning to get self-ID in Scotland - citing Malta as one of the countries to be emulated because of their stance on this topic. This would be the Malta that has an absolute abortion ban & one of whose Ministers recently said that Maltese women who went abroad for abortion should be hunted down & punished.
Haven't you noticed the violence of transactivists (as in the recent demo in Bristol) attacking women, threatening them with violence, including sexual violence telling them to go home & look after their children? Haven't you noticed the number of people with sexual offences against women & children claiming to be trans demanding that women abandon their boundaries, which are there for their protection.
Haven't you noticed Stonewall attacking lesbians for not wanting to have sex with men with penises, calling them racists, similar to anti-semites or those who were pro-apartheid? Haven't you noticed Stonewall trying to redefine sexual orientation as gender orientation? How offensive & harmful to gay rights is that? My gay son is attracted to men with male bodies. Not to a woman who feels herself to be a man. But if he says that, transactivists will call him transphobic.
Trans people in the U.K. currently have exactly the same legal rights & protections under the Equality Act as other groups. I am glad of that. I will fight to stop anyone taking those away. I will fight for those with gender dysphoria to have the care & support they need.
But it is not trans rights which are at risk of being eliminated in this country. It is the rights of women - to have single sex spaces, single sex rape & domestic violence shelters, single sex prisons, single sex sport etc & the right & ability to fight sex discrimination - which are being put at risk by those who think a man with a male body is a woman just because he feels he is. This is nonsense on stilts & puts at risk not just women but all the other protected characteristics. Why can't a white person say they should be considered "black" or "disabled" if they feel they are? What do you think that will do to the rights of black people or the disabled if categories can be Id'd into at will?
Both the extreme transactivists & the anti-abortionists prefer ideology over physical biological reality. Both think they know better than women themselves what womanhood is & how women should live their lives. Both are sexist & misogynist. Both must be resisted. And those who wish to attack gay rights will find no stronger defender of those rights than me.
You’re ignoring my point.
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
Doesn’t that worry you?
The attacks on gay rights and on those with gender dysphoria and womens' rights does worry me. I am - unfashionable as it may be - strongly socially liberal.
But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides. In some cases, they are explicitly pro-paedophile and against boundaries. Does this not worry you? I have spelt out names. You have spoken in generalities.
I do not and will not ally myself with such people. I am not really an activist. But I can make myself clear and I can disassociate myself from and attack those who seek to push back on rights which I think civilised society should value.
What I am not going to do is keep quiet when I see existing rights for women under attack here.
Last year a U.K. court ruled that it was acceptable for a woman in prison to be raped if that was the price she had to pay to validate a trans identified male's feelings. I find that appalling, truly sickening. Single sex prisons were campaigned for by Elizabeth Fry in order to prevent the sexual exploitation of women in prisons. Now a century later we have gone backwards to preserve the rights of male sex offenders who - entirely coincidentally - claim to be women when they are caught and sentenced.
That is who you ally with - men who abuse trans rights to rape women. That this is happening in Britain today with scarcely a peep from anyone should sicken any decent person.
"But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides"
No. Just no.
Agreed.
Stupidest post I've ever seen on political betting from @Cyclefree of all people.
I remember all of this crap over gay people: how they were basically closet paedophiles. My brother wasn't trusted with children. Unbelievable with hindsight.
Cyclefree of ALL people should know that you don't build law around a few rotten apples. So I'll state it quite simply: stop being a moron.
Trans people need protecting every bit as much as other LBGQ people, arguably all the more so at the moment given the vile invective from those on the far right.
Much more of that kind of trans hate and I shall cease being on pb.com. I don't need to read that kind of hate-filled nonsense. If I did, I could go and follow Piers Morgan, Katie Hopkins and Laurence Fox. Tells you everything you need to know.
p.s. I was raped by a teacher who happened to be a married man. He was sent to prison. It severely affected me but I'm not so stupid as to think that means all male teachers are bad people out to rape girls (or boys) any more than a trans person is.
Actually Cyclefree of all people probably knows you DO build law around rotten apples.
That's literally the point of most law and safeguarding, to protect people from the rotten apples.
Sometimes to protect rotten apples from rotten apples too, as rotten apples have rights too.
Was Ernesto Miranda an upstanding citizen after all?
NB Cyclefree: I do find it interesting that you respond to my query not with a direct response but a Gish Gallop of whataboutism. Did you have that text to hand ready to post, or did you type it all out just for me?
Some of those points you make are false, some of them are true but irrelevant & some of them I actually agree with. But if I took the time to respond to every single point (and my, there were a lot of them) it would never end & the endless argumentation would end up with everyone having completely forgotten the original question. Which I guess was your goal in the first place.
But the point stands: These people are coming for you, if they can manage it. Distracting you with trans politics is just part of the game - trans people are a side issue for them, a tasty snack on the way to the main event & if you think you can get what you want by siding with them & not have that rebound on you & yours in deeply personal & awful ways in the future I would personally suggest that you’re sorely mistaken.
In other words: it's much too hard work for you to respond to her argument so you're going to stick to ad hominem instead?
Did you count the number of assertions in that text? It would take days to go through each of them & give them the treatment they deserved.
But that’s the point of a Gish Gallop: to overwhelm with a flurry of assertions, knowing that the other party doesn’t have the time to refute (or even engage with) them all. You swamp the issue you don’t want to deal with a torrent of irrelevence, in the hope that the audience doesn’t notice.
You don't need to.
Just answer these questions:-
1. Name the Christo-fascist groups you say are seeking to eliminate trans people in the U.K.? 2. Name those GC feminists or feminist groups with whom they are in alliance? 3. Specify what that alliance consists of. 4. Set out the objectives they are seeking.
Since you made the allegations you should have no difficulty giving precise answers to these questions very quickly.
BTW I have to go off and do stuff now so will check in later.
If you think they’re not doing the same thing in the UK, you’re naïve.
The Tavistock case on Gillick competance & trans healthcare was led by a prominent anti-abortion lawyer - where did the funding for that case come from?
I have a bunch of screen capped quotes from GC types on Twitter that were rapidly deleted, so won’t share them - you can find them easily enough if you want to. Posy Parker seems pretty explicit about it on Facebook.
and so on...
But once again, doesn’t it worry you that you’re taking the same political side as these people? Does it give you no pause at all? You are the one who dragged trans rights into this discussion alongside the rights to aborton & all the others - have you not noticed that the “anti women” groups that want to put all the other rights on the chopping block are also going after trans rights? Does the reality that you’ve chosen their side on this issue not give you any pause at all?
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
Or you could do amazing stuff and go home to USA and find no-one else has done it, or heard of most of it.
Walk the City of London for a couple of days, but miss St Paul's and Tower. Stamford Boston Lincoln Cathedral etc Stow Walpole St Peter Walk old Norwich for a day Edington Priory Bradford on Avon St Lawrence Selby Abbey Durham Stirling (be selective)
A bit ecclesiastical, but lots of pubs in between.
I once planned a tour of the Southern part of Britain for a Dutch friend, though didn't eventually get to do it. They already knew London so we were going to head straight off.
Winchester and South downs Poole Harbour, Sandbanks, Purbeck Dartmouth, Totnes, Dartmoor Glastonbury, Bath and Wells Wye valley, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, Black mountains Cotswolds Oxford Back to London.
Actually Cyclefree of all people probably knows you DO build law around rotten apples.
That's literally the point of most law and safeguarding, to protect people from the rotten apples.
Trans people need protections but NOT in a way that violates women's protections.
And that's the biggest problem with the Trans debate. The number of actual trans (men -> women) is sadly way less than the number of male sex abusers who can see an opportunity (open) to abuse...
The reality is that there is no decent answer here because both sides have such set views they are unable to see the valid points in the other side of the argument.
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
The article suggests the average plumber now earns £350 a day compared to £250 for 13 hours' work for the average legal aid lawyer
Those figures quoted are the day rate, not hourly rate as per the article.
Depending on preparation time this can be below the minimum wage for barristers.
Ah, we’ve moved on to the “trans women are sexual deviants who are coming for your children” part of the argument..
I think @Cyclefree and JK Rowling have a particular problem with the only requirement for biological men to access women only spaces being self identification.
Now, I don't think it's an outrageous to worry that some predatory men might... you know... lie to access female only spaces.
Does that sound like a ridiculous concern?
Yes.
Plenty of women have been assaulted in the Ladies Loo by men who were definitely not identifying as women. It has happened for years if not decades. Heck even Tom Cruise followed Kelly McGillis into the Ladies in Top Gun to pester her verbally.
Women have been beaten in toilets, assaulted in toilets, filming urinating in toilets (spycams) and none of it was done by "men identifiying as women".
In that case, why have women only spaces at all? If people with penises are allowed to enter them, why have them?
FFS!
They are not ALLOWED to enter them, but they do.
You are not ALLOWED to murder people, but it still happens.
Criminals do not obey the law, it is a career requirement for them...
Ah, we’ve moved on to the “trans women are sexual deviants who are coming for your children” part of the argument..
I think @Cyclefree and JK Rowling have a particular problem with the only requirement for biological men to access women only spaces being self identification.
Now, I don't think it's an outrageous to worry that some predatory men might... you know... lie to access female only spaces.
Does that sound like a ridiculous concern?
Yes.
Plenty of women have been assaulted in the Ladies Loo by men who were definitely not identifying as women. It has happened for years if not decades. Heck even Tom Cruise followed Kelly McGillis into the Ladies in Top Gun to pester her verbally.
Women have been beaten in toilets, assaulted in toilets, filming urinating in toilets (spycams) and none of it was done by "men identifiying as women".
And is allowing men to argue that the reason they are in the women's toilets is that they identify as a woman likely to reduce or increase that existing problem?
An approach I've seen adopted in some places is to leave women's toilets as they are and convert men's toilets into "shared use" so anyone can use them.
I don't see why the accommodation needs to be made by women rather than men. Likewise in many sports - leave the women's events as they are and open out the men's event to anyone who wishes to enter regardless of gender identity.
Ah, we’ve moved on to the “trans women are sexual deviants who are coming for your children” part of the argument..
I think @Cyclefree and JK Rowling have a particular problem with the only requirement for biological men to access women only spaces being self identification.
Now, I don't think it's an outrageous to worry that some predatory men might... you know... lie to access female only spaces.
Does that sound like a ridiculous concern?
(peeks over parapet nervously)
I guess the thing here is some kind of balance. A male rapist shouldn't just be able to say, hey I'm trans, send me to a women's prison. However, neither would I be comfortable sending someone with evidence of living as a woman for ten years (but with male sex organs) to a male prison after being caught shoplifting (replace with more custodial-plausible non-sexual offence). That second person is likely to become a victim of abuse, physical, sexual or both if sent to a male prison. Male prison seems like a bad answer. Female prison? Maybe, but definitely with some extra safeguards.
I don't believe making sensible decisions here is beyond the wit of the appropriate authority (judiciary? prison services? home office? Welly, maybe in the second two cases at least it is, but it should not be).
We might need to invest to set up facilties that are safe for these people and safe for others, but we are talking a small part of the population here (wrt trans people in prisons) so it should be doable.
Other single-sex areas are more problematic. For me, gender neutral facilities make more sense, but there's a cost to those. The local commuity pool has mixed changing room which is all cubicles. That makes sense, but retrofitting every pool/gym etc with communal changing rooms would be expensive.
I do feel that both sides are focussing on the extreme (and rare) occurences instead of discussing a sensible middle ground and the idea that much of this might be case by case without blanket answers.
(I'm a man, which of course influences my views. If I was a woman, I may see things differently, but I've been considering what I'd be happy for my wife/daughter to be exposed to here)
Breakfasting in crowded Kotor. It is beautiful but my god the tourists. They surge with the Adriatic heat
Venice is the only place on earth that somehow rises above intense mass tourism, or shrugs it off, or even becomes more interesting thereby, because it was always a stage set: awaiting an audience
Where are most of the tourists from, or is it a mix?
A fair mix. Probably Americans are the most numerous, to my surprise, Why here and nowhere else?
A lot of Italians (they only have to cross the Adriatic, I guess), plenty of Russians, a few Brits, Germans and Spaniards
The Montenegrins feel very Serbian, when you point out that their language is close to Serbian they say Yes YES, It is Serbian!
Americans are numerous already in many of Europe's tourist hotspots - the Cinque Terre in Italy was awash with them. Because of the flight restrictions and the higher cost of being unable to return home if they got covid, hardly any Americans have been travelling these last few years, and those in steady jobs have money saved for a European trip. With the regulations recently lifted, there are tons of Americans making and wanting to plan European trips right now, as a dip into any of the principal travel forums will quickly demonstrate.
The difference with Americans - partly because a European trip for most of them is both more special and more rare - and partly because they follow commentators like Steves and all want to visit the most recommended spots on social media - is that those locations that have been recommended by Steves and others are flooded with Americans (so, in Italy, it's always Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, the Cinque Terre, and the high Dolomites) and it is very rare to run into US tourists anywhere else.
If you have lots in Montenegro, I would put money on Rick Steves having done a video about it.
They follow a highly predictable circuit in the UK as well, typically, Stonehenge, Bath and London.
I tried telling a few in Bath that Stonehenge was shit and there were a million other better places to visit - but whilst they listened they still said they had to do it.
If you are going to do a stone circle - do Avebury at least getting a drink is easy...
Yeah, I recommended Avebury.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
It is underwhelming.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this: Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home. Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
Or you could do amazing stuff and go home to USA and find no-one else has done it, or heard of most of it.
Walk the City of London for a couple of days, but miss St Paul's and Tower. Stamford Boston Lincoln Cathedral etc Stow Walpole St Peter Walk old Norwich for a day Edington Priory Bradford on Avon St Lawrence Selby Abbey Durham Stirling (be selective)
A bit ecclesiastical, but lots of pubs in between.
I could be the Norwich tour guide. 'I dropped my pants standing on a table in this pub, and here is the old cobbled street Elm Hill leading down to the Cathedral and the ghost of the grey lady in Tombland.'
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
The article suggests the average plumber now earns £350 a day compared to £250 for 13 hours' work for the average legal aid lawyer
Those figures quoted are the day rate, not hourly rate as per the article.
Depending on preparation time this can be below the minimum wage for barristers.
Certainly unless you get to QC level there is little money in criminal law, whereas the average corporate or commercial lawyer is very well paid
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
The article suggests the average plumber now earns £350 a day compared to £250 for 13 hours' work for the average legal aid lawyer
Those figures quoted are the day rate, not hourly rate as per the article.
Depending on preparation time this can be below the minimum wage for barristers.
Problem is most people will still think of most Barristers as being Geoffrey Cox.
Sadly I don't think the government will have trouble blaming the already existing problems in Justice as being the fault of the strikers. I see they are already lining up to blame them for delayed justice.
Unless I missed it there's been no comment here on this from today's Guardian: "A woman accused of perverting the course of justice in a murder trial has been told she must represent herself in court because there is no available barrister, in what is thought to be a legal first."
The piece goes on: "due to industrial action, no other (she was, apparently, unhappy with her barrister and was told he would not be able to continue) barrister can accept the case. With no replacement found, the. Judge has told her that she must represent herself."
Can't see how that is not grounds for appeal
Was under the impression that legal representation was a basic right? Madness.
There is a criminal barristers and solicitors strike across England and Wales today demanding more pay for legal aid lawyers
A worthy cause and one which would actually help the government deliver justice, as stringency in that area is counter productive to providing efficient and effective (and cheaper) justice, even if the media and politicians will focus on some dodgy geezer using legal aid.
The article suggests the average plumber now earns £350 a day compared to £250 for 13 hours' work for the average legal aid lawyer
Those figures quoted are the day rate, not hourly rate as per the article.
Depending on preparation time this can be below the minimum wage for barristers.
It's not even a day rate - it's a set fee for completing that particular task.
Which means that you can often do a whole pile of work and then because of other changes fail to earn anything because someone else has to take over at the last minute.
Comments
Per @loogunda, locals report that the rounds of explosions non-stop mean that an ammunition depot is exploding. Last week saw Ukraine hitting many such depots in Russia's rear
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1541337210837942274
You are (implicitly or otherwise) siding with christo-fascists who want to eliminate trans people alongside every other LGBT group, and every women‘s right achieved in the last 200 years.
Doesn’t that worry you?
(*) And the problem, as ever, is the extremes make all the noise.
To be fair, I don't know how disappointing the Statue of Liberty is, for example, but I suspect I'd at least want to see it and make my mind up for myself if I were a tourist and had never seen it before.
They have it as a toss-up.
I demur.
This is a Tory win.
https://smarkets.com/event/42787820/politics/uk/by-elections/2022/06/30/21-00/cleveleys-park-by-election
The same goes with abortion. You cannot criminalize your citizens for their actions in other States. (And think what it would mean for extradition: it would blow a massive hole in the US system for transporting suspects from state to state.)
For instance, Dinosaur National Monument.
https://www.nps.gov/dino/index.htm
https://www.humandignitytrust.org/country-profile/uganda/
https://www.humandignitytrust.org/country-profile/saudi-arabia/
https://www.humandignitytrust.org/country-profile/iran/
I do not know which feminists @Phil is referring to. Perhaps he could name them. And perhaps he could name those Christo-fascist groups they have allied to.
I certainly do not ally myself with such people.
Interestingly it is the Church of Scotland which recently came out in favour of self-ID in Scotland. So they are most certainly not gender critical or helping feminists.
Islamic views on homosexuality are somewhat tangential to the discussion. On abortion and contraception, certain Christian groups are notable for often taking a more extreme position than others within an Abrahamic tradition.
But religion is never separate from politics. The Catholic Church is set against the death penalty, but Catholics on the US Right never pay attention to that. The New Testament repeatedly decries divorce, but the US Christian Right didn't mind the multiply-divorced Trump. The Republican Party explicitly sought out abortion as a wedge issue some decades ago, producing a feedback loop that made abortion more politically central to their agenda, while also pushing abortion up the agenda among white Protestant Churches.
Some of those points you make are false, some of them are true but irrelevant & some of them I actually agree with. But if I took the time to respond to every single point (and my, there were a lot of them) it would never end & the endless argumentation would end up with everyone having completely forgotten the original question. Which I guess was your goal in the first place.
But the point stands: These people are coming for you, if they can manage it. Distracting you with trans politics is just part of the game - trans people are a side issue for them, a tasty snack on the way to the main event & if you think you can get what you want by siding with them & not have that rebound on you & yours in deeply personal & awful ways in the future I would personally suggest that you’re sorely mistaken.
No idea about this case, but defendants have been known to use 'change of lawyer' as a tactic.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61946038
I also like Avebury for a different experience.
But both are massive frauds - rebuilt in the 20th C after much neglect.
American tourists tend to be after things they can't get at home, like castles and palaces and more generally anything really old. You don't get much older than Stonehenge. I've never visited it myself but I have driven past it and it looks pretty cool.
If I were building a 1 week UK itinerary it would probably look something like this:
Day 1: British Museum (early); Thames River cruise; West End show or Ronnie Scotts
Day 2: Maritime Greenwich; picnic in a park in South London; night out in Peckham
Day 3: day trip to Cambridge; punt to Grantchester; pub lunch; return to London to catch sleeper to Glasgow
Day 4: day trip Loch Lomond
Day 5: train to York via Settle and Carlisle. Visit York Minster; hire a car and drive to Yorkshire Dales and stay at a pub
Day 6: walking in Yorkshire Dales; pub dinner
Day 7: return car, train back to London and flight home.
Could replace Glasgow/Loch Lomond with Edinburgh/East Neuk.
The error is that the numbers shown are for all respondents rather than just 2019 Tories. So the bars are in line with the description and show most 2019 Tory voters sticking with him but a very substantial minority not doing so (crucially, as they can't afford to lose anything like that number).
Put it this way - had they put the correct numbers in to match the bars and description, it would actually have looked rather better for the PM, not worse. So it must be sloppy editing rather than dishonesty - as it simply doesn't work to Johnson's advantage.
It was clear even from before the war started, that Ukraine has a top-notch intelligence operation in place.
In totally unrelated news, there’s still a NATO E-3 Sentry, two US Rivet Joints, and an F-35 over Eastern Moldova, and a Global Hawk drone in the Black Sea near Crimea.
But those who claim to be on the side of trans rights in the U.K. are - implicitly or otherwise - allying themselves with those who want to attack women and gay people and no doubt others besides. In some cases, they are explicitly pro-paedophile and against boundaries. Does this not worry you? I have spelt out names. You have spoken in generalities.
I do not and will not ally myself with such people. I am not really an activist. But I can make myself clear and I can disassociate myself from and attack those who seek to push back on rights which I think civilised society should value.
What I am not going to do is keep quiet when I see existing rights for women under attack here.
Last year a U.K. court ruled that it was acceptable for a woman in prison to be raped if that was the price she had to pay to validate a trans identified male's feelings. I find that appalling, truly sickening. Single sex prisons were campaigned for by Elizabeth Fry in order to prevent the sexual exploitation of women in prisons. Now a century later we have gone backwards to preserve the rights of male sex offenders who - entirely coincidentally - claim to be women when they are caught and sentenced.
That is who you ally with - men who abuse trans rights to rape women. That this is happening in Britain today with scarcely a peep from anyone should sicken any decent person.
And we got there with pre-booked tickets. Firstly, the queue for pre-booked tickets was long and outside the building in the drizzle. And the canopy didn't keep the drizzle off as the wind was blowing. Then they could not find my reservation, even with the printed-off tickets. When they eventually did, the museum itself was fascinating but tiny (the current British Museum exhibition is much, much better). Then there was a crummy bus ride, and a long queue of people walking about like a chain gang.
It was soulless. They have taken a place that should be spiritually uplifting and turned it into a theme park.
But that’s the point of a Gish Gallop: to overwhelm with a flurry of assertions, knowing that the other party doesn’t have the time to refute (or even engage with) them all. You swamp the issue you don’t want to deal with a torrent of irrelevence, in the hope that the audience doesn’t notice.
I would ask that you do the same about the people you are allying yourself with.
And for all the fuss, they generally did. There was no attempt to overturn the result of the 2016 election.
No. Just no.
Hundreds of things to see and do.
That's why our superb beaches are blissfully empty and the economy moribund.
The UK has so much wonderful stuff in it. We are truly blessed to live here.
Just answer these questions:-
1. Name the Christo-fascist groups you say are seeking to eliminate trans people in the U.K.?
2. Name those GC feminists or feminist groups with whom they are in alliance?
3. Specify what that alliance consists of.
4. Set out the objectives they are seeking.
Since you made the allegations you should have no difficulty giving precise answers to these questions very quickly.
BTW I have to go off and do stuff now so will check in later.
Bye for now!
Btw, rain just stopped for the moment after ca. 40 mins.
Lovely.
If you’re going to reference court cases, at least give a proper reference so I can read the judgement.
(As I understand things the prison estate has what seems to me to be entirely sensible rules: trans women, due in no small part to their own vulnerability, go in the female estate unless they have a history of sexual violence, in which case they are put in appropriate secure accommodation, I think always in the male estate but I’d have to go back to the relavant documents to check. This policy was set up after some deeply awful failures where women were sexually assaulted by sociopaths who had been put into the female estate after identifying as female. That should never have hapenned & was a terrible failure of the system.)
Once again, I must ask you: have you not noticed that the framing of LGBTQ people as “groomers” and deviants is coming from the right? It’s absolutely all over alt-right media right now & is being used to stir up violence against LGBTQ people of all stripes.
Your depiction of trans activists as “pro-peadaphile” seems to be in line with this more general attack line. Can you give actual recent quotes? Sources? Because it’s not something that I have seen anywhere personally.
Stupidest post I've ever seen on political betting from @Cyclefree of all people.
I remember all of this crap over gay people: how they were basically closet paedophiles. My brother wasn't trusted with children. Unbelievable with hindsight.
Cyclefree of ALL people should know that you don't build law around a few rotten apples. So I'll state it quite simply: stop being a moron.
Trans people need protecting every bit as much as other LBGQ people, arguably all the more so at the moment given the vile invective from those on the far right.
Much more of that kind of trans hate and I shall cease being on pb.com. I don't need to read that kind of hate-filled nonsense. If I did, I could go and follow Piers Morgan, Katie Hopkins and Laurence Fox. Tells you everything you need to know.
p.s. I was raped by a teacher who happened to be a married man. He was sent to prison. It severely affected me but I'm not so stupid as to think that means all male teachers are bad people out to rape girls (or boys) any more than a trans person is.
The passengers must be getting dizzy.
I was relieved, as I feared he'd want me to take him ...
(Gulliver's Land is great fun, though I think they're all a little far north for you.)
I mean. If you like old things, we've more castles than you can shake a stick at.
Being honest though if it's where they want to spend a while it will be brilliant fun...
Now, I don't think it's an outrageous to worry that some predatory men might... you know... lie to access female only spaces.
Does that sound like a ridiculous concern?
A Thompson 757 out of Manchester, with a bird strike into the engine on takeoff. An example of textbook use of the radio by the Captain, in training courses.
If today’s incident were a serious emergency, they’d have landed straight back overweight, so my guess is a minor emergency for this one - perhaps a hydraulic problem, or the gear/flaps didn’t go up properly.
For something like it in atmosphere, though not amazingness, try Castlerigg Stone Circle, with a world class setting.
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/castlerigg-stone-circle/history/
Chimene Suleyman@chimenesuleyman
3 Jun
“[Trans people] are a huge problem to a sane world… Every one of them is a difficulty… they’re going to need things the rest of us don’t need… so the fewer of those people there are the better.” Helen Joyce literally advocating eugenics. Dear god.
https://twitter.com/chimenesuleyman/status/1532841418972078085?s=20&t=bf-NBdSgrFIOD1oabJW74A
Yes, one can be a bit worried if some horrible people fall on the same side as ourselves for once, but it doesn't mean the more limited case we are putting (whatever the topic) is entirely contaminated by loose association.
I agree broadly with cyclefree on this subject, but I think she does go over the line every now and then on the motivations of trans activisits.
What I suspect will actually happen is that more and more criminal barristers will either join the CPS (for a steady wage) or switch to doing something else. A Barista at Nero / Starbucks earns more with way less stress.
Plenty of women have been assaulted in the Ladies Loo by men who were definitely not identifying as women. It has happened for years if not decades. Heck even Tom Cruise followed Kelly McGillis into the Ladies in Top Gun to pester her verbally.
Women have been beaten in toilets, assaulted in toilets, filming urinating in toilets (spycams) and none of it was done by "men identifiying as women".
A government looking to shore up support among its base is not going to be proposing reversing legal aid cuts.
And I'd love to go to Callinish.
I don't want governments to be absurdly profligate either, but they are not meant to be the equivalent of those parish councils who have a minuscule precept they never raise as if that is their sole function, then moan they cannot do things.
Walk the City of London for a couple of days, but miss St Paul's and Tower.
Stamford
Boston
Lincoln Cathedral etc
Stow
Walpole St Peter
Walk old Norwich for a day
Edington Priory
Bradford on Avon St Lawrence
Selby Abbey
Durham
Stirling (be selective)
A bit ecclesiastical, but lots of pubs in between.
Abusers need to be targeted, not trans people. Unless we are to take it that all trans people are, or might be, abusers?
That's literally the point of most law and safeguarding, to protect people from the rotten apples.
Trans people need protections but NOT in a way that violates women's protections.
Would you agree that medical transition has harmed this person?
https://twitter.com/TullipR/status/1536422533230206976
If I was to change your schedule but keep the broad theme I'd go Buck Palace and Windsor castle for day 2
At some point, and on some issues, it has to begin reaching out to the other two thirds.
Right now the train workers are receiving a surprising amount of public support.
Next up will be teachers. Then the NHS.
There is no semblance of a plan anywhere. Other than No!
I've said it before and will say it again. 5% across the board in the Public Sector could be agreed tomorrow.
And it can't be inflationary as it is below inflation.
A pay increase below inflation is not unreasonable.
I quite like the Welsh dolmens. Pentre Ifan is the classic one, and you can spend a good while there with it all to yourself, but there are many others.
Was Ernesto Miranda an upstanding citizen after all?
https://familypolicyalliance.com/press-releases/family-group-and-feminists-form-partnership-on-transgender-issue/
If you think they’re not doing the same thing in the UK, you’re naïve.
The Tavistock case on Gillick competance & trans healthcare was led by a prominent anti-abortion lawyer - where did the funding for that case come from?
I have a bunch of screen capped quotes from GC types on Twitter that were rapidly deleted, so won’t share them - you can find them easily enough if you want to. Posy Parker seems pretty explicit about it on Facebook.
and so on...
But once again, doesn’t it worry you that you’re taking the same political side as these people? Does it give you no pause at all? You are the one who dragged trans rights into this discussion alongside the rights to aborton & all the others - have you not noticed that the “anti women” groups that want to put all the other rights on the chopping block are also going after trans rights? Does the reality that you’ve chosen their side on this issue not give you any pause at all?
Winchester and South downs
Poole Harbour, Sandbanks, Purbeck
Dartmouth, Totnes, Dartmoor
Glastonbury, Bath and Wells
Wye valley, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, Black mountains
Cotswolds
Oxford
Back to London.
The reality is that there is no decent answer here because both sides have such set views they are unable to see the valid points in the other side of the argument.
Depending on preparation time this can be below the minimum wage for barristers.
They are not ALLOWED to enter them, but they do.
You are not ALLOWED to murder people, but it still happens.
Criminals do not obey the law, it is a career requirement for them...
An approach I've seen adopted in some places is to leave women's toilets as they are and convert men's toilets into "shared use" so anyone can use them.
I don't see why the accommodation needs to be made by women rather than men. Likewise in many sports - leave the women's events as they are and open out the men's event to anyone who wishes to enter regardless of gender identity.
I guess the thing here is some kind of balance. A male rapist shouldn't just be able to say, hey I'm trans, send me to a women's prison. However, neither would I be comfortable sending someone with evidence of living as a woman for ten years (but with male sex organs) to a male prison after being caught shoplifting (replace with more custodial-plausible non-sexual offence). That second person is likely to become a victim of abuse, physical, sexual or both if sent to a male prison. Male prison seems like a bad answer. Female prison? Maybe, but definitely with some extra safeguards.
I don't believe making sensible decisions here is beyond the wit of the appropriate authority (judiciary? prison services? home office? Welly, maybe in the second two cases at least it is, but it should not be).
We might need to invest to set up facilties that are safe for these people and safe for others, but we are talking a small part of the population here (wrt trans people in prisons) so it should be doable.
Other single-sex areas are more problematic. For me, gender neutral facilities make more sense, but there's a cost to those. The local commuity pool has mixed changing room which is all cubicles. That makes sense, but retrofitting every pool/gym etc with communal changing rooms would be expensive.
I do feel that both sides are focussing on the extreme (and rare) occurences instead of discussing a sensible middle ground and the idea that much of this might be case by case without blanket answers.
(I'm a man, which of course influences my views. If I was a woman, I may see things differently, but I've been considering what I'd be happy for my wife/daughter to be exposed to here)
Sadly I don't think the government will have trouble blaming the already existing problems in Justice as being the fault of the strikers. I see they are already lining up to blame them for delayed justice.
Which means that you can often do a whole pile of work and then because of other changes fail to earn anything because someone else has to take over at the last minute.