In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Law

Kavanaugh for SCOTUS: So how fucked are we?

Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement, and Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh to take his place on the Supreme Court. This isn’t a small deal — despite being personally right-leaning, Kennedy has tended to be the moderate swing vote for some of the more contentious cases that have come before the court. (Abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and affirmative action have all had his signature on them.) In replacing him with Kavanaugh, Trump nails down a solid conservative majority to enshrine his agenda into law and gives us our first-ever Supreme Court Justice Brett. So what does that mean for us?

On incivility: “I work for a lying, bigoted aspiring dictator” isn’t a protected class

Recently, White House mouthpiece Sarah Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, after committing the unforgivable offense of being White House mouthpiece Sarah Sanders. (Did I make that sound sarcastic? Because I meant it sincerely. What Sanders does is unforgivably offensive.) Since Sanders’s Twitter whine (from her official White House Twitter account), of course, much of the conversation has been focused on the topic of manners and civility. And yes, we still have the responsibility to be civil, we have to rise above it all, and yes, that’s true, but seriously, a person can only go high for so long and honestly just fuck it.

The Trump administration is willfully terrorizing children

The Trump administration is knowingly and intentionally terrorizing defenseless children.

Under their new “zero-tolerance” policy, every undocumented immigrant crossing the border is referred for prosecution, and their children are taken away from them, with no guarantee that they’ll ever see them again. Officials from DHS, the Justice Department, and the White House shift the blame to the courts, the Democrats, the parents, whomever they can, but it’s them, the administration, that’s doing it, and they’re doing it on purpose.

Posted in Law

Lost (“lost”?) children and families torn apart at the border

One of the biggest stories currently under discussion is the Department of Health and Human Services allegedly losing track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children placed with host families. In many cases, the story is that the Trump administration has separated those 1,500 children from their families at the U.S. border and lost track of them. As in most complicated situations like this, there’s some stuff there that’s right, and stuff there that’s wrong, and stuff there that’s conflated with other stuff. On Twitter, attorney Josie Duffy Rice sorts out the details and provides insight on what the hell is actually happening with all of those kids.

Ten people didn’t die in Santa Fe because a girl “spurned” a boy

Last week’s school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, didn’t happen because a girl “spurned” Dimitrios Pagourtzis. It didn’t happen because she “humiliated” him or “embarrassed” him in front of the class. It was neither “sparked” nor “provoked.” The headline is not that a girl rejected him. The headline is that Pagourtzis harassed her for four months before going on his killing spree.

Dear white women, please stop calling the cops on black people

Dear white women,

Please stop calling the cops on people of color.

Not when they’re in your coffee shop, or your golf course, or your gym, or your store, and you don’t want them there, and not because they don’t wave back when you wave at them. Don’t expose them to police interactions because you get a racist wiggins and need an armed officer of the law to back you up.

Stop scapegoating and alienating vulnerable people

People on all sides of the issue seem to be looking for some kind of solution to school shootings and mass shootings in general. Which is good. They’re doing that at the expense of innocent, vulnerable people. That’s bad. Pro-gun control, pro-WalkingUpNotOut, everyone is pinning this violence on people who had nothing to do with it, are already dealing with enough on their own, and are actively harmed by being saddled with that blame.

Why walking out is good, walking up is insufficient, reaching out is important, and nothing is ever, ever simple or easy

Today, thousands of students across the country walked out of their schools to protest gun violence and demand legislation that will protect them from such. But some students are being discouraged from marching. The < "https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2018/03/13/school-shootings-inspire-new-movements-national-school-walkout-and-walk-up-not-out/420837002/">Walk Up Not Out movement tells kids that instead of walking out to protest gun violence, they should walk up to a lonely kid and be nice to them to “possibly prevent the unjustifiable heartache of hundreds of lives in the future.”

The idea that abruptly being nice to the lonely kid is the answer, and the only answer, to gun violence in schools is ridiculous. Here’s why.

Student who smeared bodily fluids on her roommate’s belongings gets special probation. Not included: Any other meaningful penalty.

Brianna Brochu, who was expelled from the University of Hartford after contaminating her roommate’s belongings with blood, rancid food, and ass bacteria, has had her day in court. The verdict? Guilty of breach of peace and criminal mischief. The sentence? Two hundred hours of community service, and if she’s a good girl, her charges will be thrown out and she won’t have a criminal record for rubbing used tampons on her roommate’s backpack and (as she claimed on social media but later Posted in Crime, Racism