Tag: disability rights

Dr. Fauci admits masks didn’t actually do very much good

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As we noted earlier today, Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down for an interview with the New York Times and denied any responsibility for the COVID lockdowns. We also covered Alyssa Farah Griffin’s attempt to back him up. That attempt to rewrite history is galling enough. However, Ian Miles Cheong found something else objectionable in that interview:

Now he says it.

Now he says it after people were censored on social media for questioning his claim that masks were some kind of miracle preventative.

Now he says it after lip-reading deaf people had their lives ruined.

Yes, she won a court case but only after losing her job.

Now he says they didn’t work very well after Shannon Heroux was reduced to tears:

Now he says it after this child abuse occurred:

Now he says it after this parent told us how it harmed her children’s health:

Now he tells us.

And he knew masks weren’t important. His behavior told you that he knew:

They all knew:

They all knew, but they imposed these mandates anyway. We are not saying no one benefits from masking. Some people are more vulnerable to COVID than others. But there was never proof that the benefit of a mask mandate outweighed the harms. We should have defaulted to freedom and individual choice.

Listen to these children when they are told they were no longer going to be forced to wear a mask. Listen to their joy:

Their joy is an indictment on every politician who forced them to wear masks—especially if they couldn’t live under the rules they imposed on us.

Naturally, there were some reactions:

That would be sarcasm set to 11.

It’s okay to laugh, folks. But also don’t ever forget the lessons we learned.



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The Black Women’s Caucus Statement Against Gender Ideology is pure fire

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Via J.K. Rowling, we get this latest pushback against gender ideology:

Who are they? They are a group within, ‘Women’s Declaration International USA,’ which describes itself this way:

WDI USA is the United States chapter of the Women’s Declaration International (WDI). We are a dedicated group of volunteer women from across the country focused on protecting women’s sex-based rights.

We are a feminist group created by women, for women. At WDI USA, women always come first. Our mission is to advance the Declaration in law and policy. …

WDI USA’s actions are guided by the Declaration on Women’s Sex Based Rights, a document created by the founders of Women’s Declaration International to maintain language protecting women and girls on the basis of sex rather than ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity’.

In any case, the statement at the link is pretty amazing. It starts with: ‘We, the members of the Black Women’s Caucus of Women’s Declaration International USA, believe that it is crucial for Black Women to denounce gender identity ideology.’

Some highlights:

Gender ideologues employ the ‘forced-teaming’ tactic against Black women in order to shame us into being work mules for their campaign of male sexual privileges that they call ‘transgender rights.’ While these efforts are masked as progressive and inclusive concepts, gender identity ideology is actually intrusive and harmful to women, and uniquely so to Black women.

Gender identity ideology … is also incompatible with the fight for women’s rights because it allows men access to spaces and activities designated for women such as bathrooms, sports teams, and housing. It has been reported that 1 in 4 Black girls are sexually assaulted before the age of 18 and 35% of Black women report experiencing physical sexual violence. Policies that allow men unfettered access to female-designated facilities put Black women and girls, a demographic disproportionately impacted by male violence, at an even higher risk.

And they brought the receipts:

There have already been deadly consequences where an employer ignored a Black woman’s whistleblowing regarding a male who demanded to be recognized as a woman. Monica Archer, a caseworker in a women’s shelter, warned her employers about a client, Harvey Marcelin living as Marceline Harvey, who’d made threats against her and other shelter employees. Archer was fired for speaking out. Marcelin had already served 50 years for murdering and dismembering two women and after Archer’s whistleblowing was ignored, Marcelin was found to have murdered and dismembered a 68-year-old ‘gal-pal’ he had met while living in the women’s shelter.

It goes on and continues to be great stuff and it is worth considering in its entirety. Naturally, this provoked reactions:

We’re not that optimistic, but it’s definitely an encouraging sign.

Of course, there was pushback:

‘Yakubite’ appears to be a reference to the super-racist and super-crazy theory that white people were actually invented by an evil scientist named Yakub, according to the Nation of Islam. Yes, really. If you read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, he says it is the explicit doctrine of that group (which is outside of any mainstream conception of Islam). It’s as if Scientology and racism had a baby.

What is interesting to us is that Black Women’s Caucus argument against gender ideology is an argument from the left. Except for being against trans ideology, it is basically a leftist argument in its form, focus, and modes of argumentation. It is identity politics, arrayed against people who pretend that your identity is whatever you decide it is.

And it’s not the first time we have seen this. For instance, the Montgomery, Maryland public schools have apparently gone ‘gender neutral’ with respect to their restrooms, allowing boys to go into girls’ restrooms apparently without even pretending they identify as women, and it got pushback from the Council on American–Islamic Relations (‘CAIR’):

From Reason:

One of CAIR’s offices is also handling a case involving the rights of a Muslim student who had removed her hijab to adjust it in the girls’ bathroom at her public school when a student who she perceived to be of the opposite sex entered and saw her with her hair exposed in violation of her sincerely held beliefs, leaving her feeling shocked and humiliated.

Other parents have informed CAIR’s Maryland office that their children no longer feel safe or comfortable using school bathrooms and wait until they return home at the end of the day to use the bathroom, raising concerns about poor health outcomes and the impact on school performance.

This was also a problem at Yale University where they decided to have gender-neutral dorms:

From Legal Insurrection:

The current policy disproportionately affects Muslim students. Often, they succumb to being pushed to off-campus housing, at a rate higher than their non-Muslim peers. Students who remain on campus are forced to change their habits to avoid sacrificing their core beliefs. These potential habit changes are non-negligible. Without single-gender bathrooms, Muslim women are forced to be on guard and wear a hijab, even during times when they normally would not: just taking a shower or going to the bathroom becomes a stressful and inconvenient burden, taking a toll on their mental health. Living quarters become a space of anxiety, not rest.

Muslims also must pray 5 times a day. In order to do so, they perform wudu, a type of ablution or purification using water. This involves wiping the top of the head with their hand, which must be done without any fabric or impediment in the way. If Muslim women are not able to remove their hijab because of the mixed-gender bathrooms, they cannot perform wudu, and, as a result, they cannot fulfill their obligatory daily prayer. Mandatory mixed-gender bathrooms directly interfere with students’ right to their religious practices.

This is not only heartless behavior—essentially blocking a person from utterly reasonable practices of their faith—but it might also violate various civil rights laws.

All of this raises the question of whether identity politics, which conservatives have their own objections to, might end up making a common cause with conservatives to defeat gender ideology—a view that literally identity is malleable.

We shall see.



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With 300 Lawyers Watching Closely, Elon Musk Apologizes For Mocking Disabled Worker

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Elon Musk loves trolling. Even more, Elon Musk loves giving absolute shit to the lazy do-nothings whom he laid off from Twitter because they were dead weight who weren’t willing to be hardcore. So when a laid-off Twitter employee in Iceland took to Twitter to confirm whether he’d been laid off or not (he’d been locked out of his company work systems with no explanation), Musk lit into him, publicly accusing him of malingering and maybe faking a disability, and mocking the guy for obviously trying to win sympathy and a bigger payout.

Oh dear. It turned out not to be some random codemonkey. The shitcanned worker, former Twitter senior director Haraldur Thorleifsson (known as Halli), replied with the details of his disability (he has muscular dystrophy and severe mobility limitations), and pointed out that he’d joined Twitter after the company’s previous management purchased his entire company, the digital branding company Ueno, in 2021.

Thorleifsson is also kind of a big deal in Iceland, as CNN reports. He

has been recognized by the United Nations and the president of Iceland for spearheading a charitable effort to build 1,000 wheelchair ramps around Reykjavik to increase the city’s accessibility.

When his company was acquired by Twitter, he chose to take the payment as wages, so he’d be taxed at a higher rate, as a way of “paying it forward” to Iceland’s social safety net.

Musk may have eventually been tapped on the shoulder by some expensive attorneys to inform him that berating a laid off employee and accusing him of faking his severe disability wasn’t a great look from an employment law perspective. Late Tuesday, Musk finally apologized to Thorleifsson and insisted it was all a big misunderstanding, and golly, maybe he’d like to keep working at Twitter? No harm, no foul, please don’t sue my pants off.

Thorleifsson’s initial request wasn’t particularly mean; he simply wanted some clarification:

Dear @elonmusk [waving hand emoji]

9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees.

However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You’ve not answered my emails.

Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?

Musk’s first reply was skeptical right from the start, asking Thorleifsson to detail the work he’s been doing and scoffing at the projects Thorleifsson said he’d worked on. Musk topped that off with a video clip from Office Space to mock the very idea that Thorleifsson did anything worthwhile at all, haha!

God, why do these losers think they deserve anything from the Great Man?

Thorleifsson replied that well, sure, “you have every right to lay me off,” but a lotta guys woulda actually told people that had happened. He noted in a follow-up tweet that he’d received an email confirming he was no longer employed, and asking if he could please be paid his severance.

Musk, replying to someone else’s summary of the conversation, got snotty:

The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm. Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.

But was he fired? No, you can’t be fired if you weren’t working in the first place!

HAW HAW.

Thorleifsson ever so politely posted a long thread Tuesday with plenty of context on his disability and his work history. Quote-tweeting Musk’s accusation that maybe he wasn’t really that disabled, Thorleifsson wrote,

Hi again @elonmusk

I hope you are well.

I’m fine too. I’m thankful for your interest in my health.

But since you mentioned it, I wanted to give you more info.

I have muscular dystrophy. It has many effects on my body.

Let me tell you what they are:

He went on, in sufficient detail to make clear that he has a good life but that he also is very definitely disabled, and now needs help to even get in and out of bed or to use the toilet. He also outlined his business success, noting that

We worked for more or less every big tech company.

We grew fast and made money. I think that’s what you are referring to when you say independently wealthy?

That I independently made my money, as opposed to say, inherited an emerald mine.

He noted that when he sold his company to Twitter, he accepted an offer that was lower than might have been wise, because “like you I made a bet on Twitter having a lot more potential than it has had.” He also added,

I joined at a time when the company was growing fast. You kind of did the opposite.

There was a lot going on. The company had a fair amount of issues, but then again, most bigger companies do.

Or even small companies, like Twitter today.

This is where I would like to offer Mr. Thorleifsson a job at Wonkette, although it would be a big drop-off in income.

He went on to detail his time at Twitter, and how he kept working on everything his manager asked for, although HR never quite explained what his job description in the rapidly shrinking company was. He saved the coup de grace for the thread’s last few tweets:

And now finally to my fingers, which I know you have great concern for. Thank you for that btw.

I’ll tell you what I told them. I’m not able to do manual work (which in this case means typing or using a mouse) for extended periods of time without my hands starting to cramp.

I can however write for an hour or two at a time.

This wasn’t a problem in Twitter 1.0 since I was a senior director and my job was mostly to help teams move forward, give them strategic and tactical guidance.

But as I told HR (I’m assuming that’s the confidential health information you are sharing) I can’t work as a hands on designer for the reasons outlined above.

I’m typing this on my phone btw. It’s easier for because I only need to use one finger. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633253950198624257

Gosh, we wonder which finger he’s giving Elon there.

He closed by asking again whether he would be paid what he’s owed, adding “I think you can afford it?”

As a postscript, Thorleifsson offered one more thought, referring to reports that Musk has become so paranoid that he is always accompanied by at least two bodyguards when he’s at Twitter HQ, including when he goes to the restroom:

Oh! I forgot to mention that I read you can’t go to the toilet on your own either @elonmusk

I’m sorry to hear about that. I know the feeling.

The only difference is I can’t do it because of a physical disability and you’re afraid someone you hurt will attack you while you poop.

And then, nothing for hours.

Musk eventually tweeted, late Tuesday, to say he was very very sorry and that he’d had a video call with Thorleifsson to clear everything up and everything’s fine now. Musk was just dealing with some inaccurate information — surely a first in the history of Twitter — and now everything’s fine. How are you?

Based on your comment, I just did a videocall with Halli to figure out what’s real vs what I was told. It’s a long story.

Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet.

BETTER TO TALK TO PEOPLE THAN TO COMMUNICATE VIA TWEET.

Ladies, gentlemen, nonbinaries, and sentient AI’s, we present Elon Musk’s eventual epitaph, on a future headstone that will be guarded so that no one may piss on it.

Musk followed that with,

I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful.

He is considering remaining at Twitter.

The news reports we’ve seen note that Thorleifsson hasn’t said what his own plans are. But on Twitter, he announced today that he’s releasing a music album. We get the feeling he may be done with Twitter anyway.

[AP / Mashable]

Please keep Wonkette typing at you with any fingers that may be relevant to the topic. We love you!



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