All entries by this author

They have no place

Feb 22nd, 2022 4:39 am | By

Suzanne Moore rebukes the New York Times:

[T]his New York Times ad is more than idiotic – it is dangerous. Imagine a world in which JK Rowling did not write the books we know she did. What happens to the author in this scenario, her intellectual property? Will her creation be removed in some Maoist obliteration? Imagine she does not exist. What does that actually mean? Let me spell it out.

Every death threat I have ever had, every woman I have spoken to about being stalked or abused, has heard these words. They have “no place”, they have “no right to exist”. It is a threat, and I felt sick when I saw that fox-killing egomaniac lawyer, Jolyon

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A visit to Kharkiv

Feb 21st, 2022 5:43 pm | By

The BBC did a story on the Ukraine famine last week.

Resentment of Moscow in Ukraine has deep historical roots. In the Great Famine of the 1930s, as many as four million Ukrainians died during the forced collectivisation of farms by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The BBC’s Fergal Keane has been to the eastern city of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, and met some of the last survivors of the famine.

…Petro Mohalat, now aged 95, remembers the first food raids in the winter of 1932.

He was five years old when the communist “brigade” arrived in the village. His grandmother told the children to hide anywhere they could.

“It was very scary. The brigade had pitchforks and they

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4 million Ukrainians who died

Feb 21st, 2022 5:14 pm | By

The Atlantic October 2017: Anne Applebaum on the famine Stalin created in Ukraine:

In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. It was then exacerbated, in the autumn of 1932, when the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful

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Speak out. No not like THAT.

Feb 21st, 2022 4:22 pm | By

Misogyny spotted in the wild.

https://twitter.com/mcashmanCBE/status/1495488332733759495 https://twitter.com/mcashmanCBE/status/1495501574608723970

Speak out, the man says, so a woman speaks out, and he swats her away as if she were a mosquito. I do not like this Michael Cashman.… Read the rest



Screaming Lord

Feb 21st, 2022 3:34 pm | By

Internecine war continues.

https://twitter.com/Jebadoo2/status/1495878804719513606

Is he?

Yes.

https://twitter.com/mcashmanCBE/status/1495524750784970758

Not wrong. Claimed rights of trans people – that aren’t actually rights, but the ideology insists that they are – to be “validated” as the other sex and to take over the other sex’s spaces and prizes and sports and jobs do indeed conflict with the rights of women. Lia Thomas is one current illustration of how that works. Cashman is either wrong or lying when he says trans rights don’t conflict with the rights of women. No skin off his ass is it, since they’re not his rights.

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No longer the good girl

Feb 21st, 2022 11:43 am | By

Hadley Freeman on why she stopped being a good girl, i.e. a people-pleaser. The shift began in 2014.

I was reading the New Yorker one evening and came across an article with the headline “What is a Woman?”. It was, according to the standfirst, about “the dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism”, a subject about which I knew nothing. I read it, vaguely interested in the social shift that meant being “transgender” no longer refers to someone who has undergone a sex change operation, but is now “how someone sees themselves”, as the writer Michelle Goldberg put it. This meant, Goldberg continued, that women-only spaces were increasingly changing to women-and-transwomen spaces, even if those transwomen still had

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People’s republics

Feb 21st, 2022 9:54 am | By

Putin’s going to do a tv talk soon.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to give a televised address soon and he’s expected to speak on whether to recognise the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”.

Russia-backed rebels in those areas – located in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region – have been fighting the Ukrainian military since 2014 but Moscow has not officially recognised their self-declared republics.

Step one. Step two is sending in Russian soldiers to defend the new “republics.”… Read the rest



With membahs of my commoonitah

Feb 21st, 2022 9:34 am | By

Sure enough, he backed out.

https://twitter.com/DearSplenda/status/1495808326113927172… Read the rest


Hairy feminists

Feb 21st, 2022 8:56 am | By

Graham Linehan on Jon Ronson on Michfest:

His documentary about Michfest is, of course, a disgrace: the denigration of second-wave feminists is so facile that it actually includes a reference to them “not shaving their legs”; his barely-disguised cheerleading of third-wave feminism—what a coincidence, the porn-positive feminism that most benefits Jon—is grimly revealing. Jon’s compassion is infinite… if you’re male. If you’re female, your rights are subject to the whims of fashion.

Not shaving their legs? Really? Does Jon Ronson shave his?

And of course, there is the unmistakable attempt, one with which feminists are wearily familiar, to place trans-identified males inside the same moral framework as black people experiencing racism. This relentless propaganda, combined with the ambient soundtrack

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Russia says Ukraine is invading

Feb 21st, 2022 8:06 am | By

Not a good sign.

BBC Live says all signs are that Russia is invading Ukraine.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says “All the indicators point to increasing numbers and readiness of Russian forces.”

He says the pledge to withdraw Russian troops from Belarus at the end of their joint military drills “was not carried out”.

“The exercise has now been extended until further notice,” he says.

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Is it fair?

Feb 20th, 2022 4:26 pm | By

And the rest of it.… Read the rest



Fighting back

Feb 20th, 2022 4:19 pm | By

This is excellent. GB News was looking for volunteers on Twitter earlier because someone else had to back out, and Dennis raised his hand and so did Jon Pike.

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Ugly politics

Feb 20th, 2022 12:02 pm | By

Help friends harm enemies: Republican ethics in a nutshell.

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is backing a controversial proposal to strip $200m in education funding from Democratic counties that defied his executive order last year banning mask mandates in schools.

The Democratic counties did what they thought would help protect students and teachers from a dangerous virus, while the Republican ones took the “don’t tell us what to do” route, which is not always clever in matters of public health. In other words the Dem counties didn’t do anything actually wrong or malicious. It seems very piggy to punish the schools in those counties for that kind of best judgement decision.… Read the rest



Only if you say you’re doing it

Feb 20th, 2022 11:52 am | By

Promoting women is sex discrimination, giving scholarships to minorities is majority discrimination, free school lunches are wealth discrimination, yaddayaddayadda.

The Republican senator Ted Cruz complained on Sunday that Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the supreme court was an instance of racial discrimination…

No it’s a correction of generations of racial and sex discrimination. I’m sure he understands that point, it’s not very complicated, but one must throw red meat to The Base.

“Democrats today believe in racial discrimination,” Cruz told Fox News Sunday. “They’re they’re committed to it as a political proposition. I think it is wrong to stand up and say, ‘We’re going to discriminate.’”

But it’s perfectly all right to discriminate in favor … Read the rest



How the new commentariat launders its privilege

Feb 20th, 2022 9:45 am | By

Brendan O’Neill, in one of his getting something right moments, points out the flaw in Laurie Penny’s “feminism”:

Penny writes an awful lot about women for someone who doesn’t know what a woman is. Ostensibly this is a feminist tract, about how humanity faces a terrifying choice – it either carries on down the road to fascism or it embraces the corrective of Laurie Penny’s feminism. (Talk about a rock and a hard place!) And yet it’s a strange feminist tome that thinks men can be women, too. Penny gets it out of the way early. ‘In this book, when I talk about “men” and “women”… I am including everyone who locates themselves in those categories’, she says on

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Moley is a genius

Feb 20th, 2022 8:53 am | By
https://twitter.com/moleatthedoor/status/1495436103725289474… Read the rest


The state religion of the People’s Republic of Tumblr

Feb 20th, 2022 6:18 am | By

Andy Lewis pointed out this article (to Aaron Rabinowitz specifically) by a detransitioned young woman, and it’s got some strikingly explanatory observations. For her it all started with Tumblr.

A major aspect of Tumblr culture has always been social justice ideology. Things that are now being played out and witnessed by the general public on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, like dissociative identity disorder LARPers, demisexuals, neopronouns, otherkin, and everything you see on @LibsOfTikTok, have long existed in an uncannily identical form on tumblr.com. The oppression hierarchy of racial and gender identities now being written into law in many of our once serious nations was the state religion of the People’s Republic of Tumblr long before your political junkie

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Grace doesn’t want his coat

Feb 20th, 2022 5:27 am | By

Back in November “Grace” Lavery was pining for a debate.

Helen Joyce took him up on it.

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Splitting

Feb 19th, 2022 6:09 pm | By

Another thing about this – or maybe it’s the same thing but just louder –

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1494459409786761226

The other thing. There is no Harry Potter without its creator. Why? Because she’s the one who created it. That thing they love so much? (I don’t love it, myself, so I can take a detached view of the fandom and the ardor.) That thing they love so much is the work of the woman they think they hate so much. You can’t have a Harry Potter without its creator, because that would be something completely different. The creator isn’t incidental to the creation; she’s prior and essential.

Their adoration of Harry Potter means they adore her, whether they know it or … Read the rest



Expel the unbeliever

Feb 19th, 2022 5:40 pm | By

Shahrar Ali is suing the Green Party.

A Green Party spokesman is bringing legal action against his former colleagues after he was sacked because of his views on the transgender debate.

Shahrar Ali, 53, was removed as the spokesman for policing and domestic safety on February 5 after activists complained that his tweets about women’s sex-based rights were transphobic.

It’s a neat trick to label non-belief in your magical mystery woo “phobic.” I don’t believe extraterrestrials drop in on us now and then for a chat; that’s not “phobic.” I just don’t believe it.

Party officials ruled that “his decision to champion a highly controversial position in the trans rights debate is not compatible” with his role.

But it’s … Read the rest