All entries by this author

Guest post: A social justice version of pareidolia

Oct 16th, 2022 5:22 pm | By

Originally a comment by Sastra on It’s a war on multiple fronts.

The identity theft of an entire sex (both of them) could never have been pulled off without guilt: guilt over the way we for so long refused to accept homosexuality as a perfectly normal and natural orientation; guilt over the way we for so long put women and men into restrictive “boxes” of attitude and behavior; and guilt over the way we for so long allowed children to be mercilessly bullied on the supposition that it made them “toughen up.” By “we,” I mean modern Western society. We ought to have known better. We should have been heroes.

And so we — some of us, that is … Read the rest



Trans people are protected, women are not

Oct 16th, 2022 3:09 pm | By

Leicester Police issue a Statement on a previous Statement (or collection of tweets) about Hate Crime:

Temporary Chief Constable Rob Nixon said: “Over the past week, a number of social media posts were issued on our Leicestershire Police Stay Safe account aiming to raise awareness of hate crime. This was as part of National Hate Crime Awareness Week.”

Twitter, that is. He means “our Leicestershire Police Stay Safe Twitter account” but forgot to say so. “Social media” isn’t just another word for Twitter. It includes Twitter but it isn’t limited to Twitter.

“While we recognise that people have strong and often conflicting views regarding this issue, we should not forget the seriousness of hate crime and the devastating crimes that

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Guest post: It’s a war on multiple fronts

Oct 16th, 2022 10:46 am | By

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on It’s about an innate sense of self.

You may ask how anyone can assess the authenticity of somebody else’s “innate sense of self”. I haven’t a clue.

No one has a clue, because it’s inherently meaningless and impossible. Trans ideology is wholly dependent on the worship of a magical Self, but only for some people. Feminist women don’t get to claim any kind of magical self; we’re just a kind of donkey, or system of pulleys.

Nobody has direct, unmediated access to what is going on inside anyone’s head. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about people’s self image and self understanding. People suffering from anorexia. Rachel Dolezal. … Read the rest



Guest post: By then, it will be too late

Oct 16th, 2022 10:24 am | By

Originally a comment by Cluecat on Six out of ten.

As is mentioned in the other posts, this is a huge problem with industrial livestock raising all over the world.

There are a few antibiotic agents designated as the absolute “last line of defence” – to only ever be used in human treatment when literally nothing else has had any effect, and to never ever be routinely prescribed because of that critical designation.

These medications treat bugs that are resistant to every other antibiotic on the market, infections that cause horrible, drawn-out death. These meds are the reason we no longer have Sepsis Wards in healthcare settings in Western countries – although it looks like we might be … Read the rest



Guest post: Bullfrogs croaking in the distance

Oct 16th, 2022 10:07 am | By

Originally a comment by iknklast on They’re gone.

I remember even as recently as 15 years ago my husband and I would sit on the porch watching fireflies. They were abundant. Bullfrogs croaking in the distance, and crickets chirping somewhere unseen…and we live in the city. A small city, to be sure, but a city. Now what I see is squirrels, domesticated pets, and the roar of automobiles.

I’ve been talking about this a long time. People want to focus solely on global warming, and I’ve had this argument – what good is a world where we’ve solved global warming and there are no animals left? We need to focus on the big picture, but we are not good … Read the rest



Literally just a man calling himself a woman

Oct 16th, 2022 9:42 am | By

OJ has a gotcha.

He’s literally a man running for public office while claiming to be a woman. That’s it. That “it” is not nothing. Imagine a white man running against Raphael Warnock while claiming to be black – imagine how well that would go over. Consider why that would not go over well. Now apply that to a man running for public office while claiming to be a woman. … Read the rest



So long herons

Oct 16th, 2022 9:28 am | By

Say goodbye to wetlands?

On Oct. 3 — the first day of its new term — the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, a case that could dramatically reduce the number of wetlands and other waters across the United States that are protected under the landmark Clean Water Act.

And the court being what it is, it seems very likely to be team Sackett and not the EPA that wins.

The Sacketts started their dispute with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2007, after purchasing a parcel of land that was subject to Clean Water Act protections. The parcel — which included sensitive wetlands a stone’s throw from Priest Lake, one of the

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New shipments

Oct 16th, 2022 7:00 am | By
New shipments

The transports continue.

The Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, plans to continue flying undocumented migrants to Democratic strongholds, his spokeswoman said on Saturday, a day after released records showed the state paid nearly $1m to arrange two sets of flights to Delaware and Illinois.

But worth every penny, to make a point and torment the migrants.

The flights would be a follow-up to 14 September flights from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, that carried 49 mostly Venezuelan migrants to the island where the former president Barack Obama owns a home. Local officials were not told in advance that the migrants were coming.

DeSantis claimed responsibility for the flights as part of a campaign to focus attention on

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Language does matter

Oct 16th, 2022 6:38 am | By

More precision or less precision? It depends on who is talking.

A transgender science teacher has become the subject of criticism after a video of him insisting it was important to “clean up” language, like “women produce eggs” and “males are more likely to be colorblind,” in order to be more “accurate” and “precise,” resurfaced from a webinar series held earlier this year.

Sam Long, an activist for “gender-inclusive” policies and “trans/non-binary” educators, teaches science at Denver South High School, part of the Denver Public Schools (DPS) system. Long, along with other science teachers, has previously spent time establishing “gender-inclusive biology” curriculum resources, which he promotes to educators across the country.

Science teachers teaching magical nonsense.

During an April webinar

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They’re gone

Oct 15th, 2022 5:32 pm | By

Bill McKibben writes:

A vast new study finds there are 70 percent fewer wild animals sharing the earth with us than there were in 1970.

Ouch.

I notice a lot of missing wild animals even here in big city Seattle. It used to be commonplace to see mergansers and coots and buffleheads on lakes and ponds here, lots of them, and now I walk along Lake Washington and see none at all. None at all. Sometimes I see one or two, but not often. And swallows. Swallows used to come back in the spring, and you’d see a lot of them. Now? Zip. None. Very occasionally one lone pair, but that’s all. They’re just gone.… Read the rest



Concerned individuals

Oct 15th, 2022 5:07 pm | By

We must burn the house down to save it.

Eco-activists have doused UK supermarket aisles with milk – including Harrods, Fortnum & Mason and Waitrose, with Animal Rebellion spokesperson Robert Gordon telling LBC “we don’t have a choice”.

The co-ordinated protests from Animal Rebellion activists were staged across the UK, pouring milk down aisles and dousing displays in what they dubbed ‘Milk Pours’.

We must waste food in order to [something goes here].

Here they are in action. It’s quite unpleasant to watch, all that milk wasted, not to mention the mess they won’t be cleaning up.

Read the rest


It’s about an innate sense of self

Oct 15th, 2022 1:15 pm | By

JKR on Nicola Sturgeon:

Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, believes the protesters outside parliament on October 6 have nothing to complain about. The woman who calls herself a “real feminist” said to the BBC that her proposed new Gender Recognition Act “doesn’t give any additional rights to trans people nor does it take any rights away from women”.

That just shows she has her whole fists stuck in her ears, aka she’s not listening.

If Sturgeon’s new act passes into law, a person will be able to change their legal gender as long as they’ve lived in their acquired gender for three months, and made a statutory declaration that they intend to keep doing so. Remarkably, nobody

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Six out of ten

Oct 15th, 2022 11:26 am | By

BBC India correspondent Soutik Biswas reports:

At the 1,000-bed not-for-profit Kasturba Hospital in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, doctors are grappling with a rash of antibiotic-resistant “superbug infections”.

This happens when bacteria change over time and become resistant to drugs that are supposed to defeat them and cure the infections they cause.

To be a little more precise, it happens when natural selection does what it does: selects the bacteria that because of a favorable mutation are able to resist the antibiotic. The more the antibiotic is used, the more of those bacteria there are.

Such resistance directly caused 1.27 million deaths worldwide in 2019, according to The Lancet, a medical journal. Antibiotics – which are considered to

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And gender-diverse people

Oct 15th, 2022 10:27 am | By
And gender-diverse people

Nothing can be for women any more. Nothing nothing nothing. Every single thing has to be taken away and made for men too.

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Under new plans

Oct 15th, 2022 10:03 am | By

Never heard of antibiotic resistance then?

Patients will be able to obtain antibiotics from pharmacies without seeing a doctor under new plans aimed at reducing the need for GP appointments.

Thérèse Coffey, the health secretary, has pushed to make antibiotics more freely available and has said that she has previously handed out her own supplies of the medicines to friends and family who were feeling unwell.

She what???

One, she shouldn’t have “supplies” of antibiotics – you have to take the whole prescription. Two, you’re not supposed to give them away like after dinner mints! Three, they’re not for “feeling unwell”! Four, there are different antibiotics, they’re not interchangeable or random or all-purpose. Five, antibiotic resistance is a crisis the … Read the rest



The challenges they face

Oct 15th, 2022 5:36 am | By

NPR is so captured.

This story is part of a series looking at transgender inmates in the U.S. and the challenges they face in confinement and upon release. The series focuses on topics such as being incarcerated in prisons that do not reflect their gender identity, the medical hurdles faced behind bars and rehousing after being released.

Does the series ever focus on the results for women when men are incarcerated in prisons that do reflect their “gender identity”? The danger, the loss of privacy, the fear?

“Christina” Lusk had just been told he would be getting “surgery to affirm her gender identity” but before it happened he was busted for dealing meth.

She pleaded guilty. She has since

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A platform

Oct 15th, 2022 4:55 am | By

The same old stupid lies:

Being a sports star does give [Olympic diver Tom Daley] a platform that’s useful for more than just reverse pike backflips. He was “furious” after a ruling by the diving body FINA in June to ban transgender women who have gone through male puberty.

“We should be sending out a message to everyone that everyone is welcome no matter who you are, where you come from, your gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, whatever it is, everyone should feel welcome when they try sport,” he says.

Welcome in sport, yes, but not men welcome in women’s sport. Easy for Tom Daley to ignore the problem with letting men invade women’s sport.

We don’t get into

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First degree nominalism

Oct 15th, 2022 4:12 am | By

It’s always interesting to see the police getting the law completely wrong.

https://twitter.com/LPStaySafe/status/1579426966947917826

See, the problem with that is, it’s not a crime. If it’s not a crime it can’t be a hate crime, because as many people are patiently pointing out TO THE POLICE, there is no stand-alone hate crime: there has to be a crime first, which can then have the category “hate crime” added. It’s not a crime to get someone’s name wrong, even on purpose. It may be rude, but it’s not a crime.

Meanwhile, as I keep saying, rape is almost never prosecuted.… Read the rest



Deear Knogresss

Oct 14th, 2022 5:15 pm | By

Trump sent the January 6 committee an angry letter:

The same group of Radical Left Democrats who utilized their Majority position in Congress to create the fiction of Russia, Russia, Russia, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, the $48 Million Mueller Report (which ended in No Collusion!), Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, the atrocious and illegal Spying on my Campaign, and so much more, are the people who created this Committee of highly partisan political Hacks and Thugs whose sole function is to destroy the lives of many hard-working American Patriots, whose records in life have been unblemished until this point of attempted ruination. The double standard of the Unselects between what has taken place on the “RIGHT,” and what has

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The ideology behind this request

Oct 14th, 2022 10:46 am | By

Sometimes the stupidity goes on and on and on until it’s out of sight, like Route 66 or the Trans-Siberian railway. Behold an online summit devoted to research on a famous 18th century lesbian, requesting “your pronouns” and then removing a lesbian who provides sarcastic ones, and then blocking anyone who criticizes this lesbian-hostile behavior.

So, obediently, we consult the Code of Conduct:

Anne Lister Research Summit

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