Graham Douglas in a comment told us about a statue that has been moved from a prominent place in front of the National Trust property Dunham Massey Hall.

The Dunham Massey Hall sundial is a lead sculpture depicting a kneeling Black man holding a sundial on his head. It was created during the early 18th century, and until 2020 stood outside Dunham Massey Hall, a stately home in Cheshire, England.

Its subject matter attracted criticism and in 2020 the National Trust removed it amid the global wave of statue removals connected with the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. It is currently held in storage.

The sundial sculpture is a black, polychromed cast-lead statue. It depicts a

Apparently learning more about history is excessively “woke.”

The head of the National Trust has said she received anonymous death threats during a “culture war” row over the organisation’s perceived “wokeness”.

Oh no, what did they do? Rename themselves the Critical Race Theory Trust?

The row was sparked by NT efforts to learn more about the history of its properties, including a report published last year that found connections between 93 of its historic places and colonialism and slavery.

Oh. They reported on the fact that the money that built those historic places came from somewhere.

What was the thinking before that? That it’s all just a miracle? Somehow a few men designated “aristocrats” were rewarded with prodigy houses and … Read the rest

Whew it’s been a weather here. A week ago today, early in the morning, it started snowing as if being blasted from a fire hose, and the temperatures went down way below freezing and stayed there until today.

So now there is slush everywhere, but even so walking is easier than it’s been for a week, and tomorrow it will be more so. I just walked up and down the block 8 times because the sidewalk is naked from one end to the other and that’s still a rarity. Before that I walked to the library – it had been closed for the whole week.

Your Chicago and Minneapolis don’t close down when it snows but then it snows a … Read the rest

Harry Miller v College of Policing might as well not have happened.

.@SurreyPolice consider this a public order offence and wish to arrest the person who posted it.

Please retweet if you disagree this is a public order offence and that the police should have better things to do. pic.twitter.com/HusqNdoRRI

— WeAreFairCop (@WeAreFairCop) January 2, 2022

2022 will therefore be the year of injunctions and damages, over and over again until lessons are finally learned.

— WeAreFairCop (@WeAreFairCop) January 2, 2022

Or how does it fall within section 5? How is any of this ‘threatening or abusive’? pic.twitter.com/Sdh4e4Psfi

— WeAreFairCop (@WeAreFairCop) January 2, 2022

https://twitter.com/MartinNeill3/status/1477685940818780171 … Read the rest

Finally – a NO!

A group of the UK’s leading girls’ schools will not accept transgender pupils because they are worried it will ‘jeopardise’ their status as single-sex institutions. 

Stupid place to put scare quotes. Yes, jeopardise; what’s wrong with that word?

The Girls’ Day School Trust, which represents 23 private schools and two academies, updated its gender identity policy guidance document last month and shared it with its members. 

In a new section on admissions, the GDST said its schools do not accept applications from pupils  who are legally biologically male, even if they identify as women [girls].

They said that having a policy on ‘gender identity’ rather than the sex recorded on a pupil’s birth certificate would ‘jeopardise

Marjorie Taylor Greene joins Trump is being permanently booted off Twitter.

Twitter on Sunday permanently suspended the personal account of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, after the company said she had violated its Covid-19 misinformation policies.

Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled information from a government database of unverified raw data called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a decades-old system that relies on self-reported cases from patients and health care providers.

Twitter said that Ms. Greene had a fifth “strike,” which meant that her account will not be restored. The company had 

Sonia Sodha says something you’d think would be too obvious to have to say:

The police need to be politically impartial – they must not police people differently because of their political opinions. Yet there are numerous examples of police forces actively taking political sides in the sex and gender debate. Paul Giannasi, the national policing adviser for hate crime, has praised Lancashire police for expressing disappointment at lawful expressions of gender critical belief, congratulating them for their “initiative and empathy” in doing so.

Empathy for whom? For men who say they are women. Definitely not for women.

The police officer who unlawfully warned off [Harry] Miller told him, Miller said, that a foetus could have a female brain but

Just handing away our rights as if they were his to hand away.

There's also women in American prisons right now how have been sexually assaulted by lesbian prisoners. Do you want them removed from women's prisons as well?

— @etvpod.bsky.social (@ETVPod) January 1, 2022

No, I'm proving you're willing to accept a nonzero amount of risk by housing lesbians. Then it's a separate question if housing trans women is more like housing lesbians or housing cis men. I haven't seen any evidence to prove it's like the latter, just one really weak study.

— @etvpod.bsky.social (@ETVPod) January 1, 2022

Oh just stop right there. That’s cheating. It’s not “a question” whether housing trans women is more like housing lesbians … Read the rest

Andy Lewis aka Le canard noir is doing a letters-debate thing with Embrace the void aka Aaron Rabinowitz. The latter defines some terms at the outset:

The other important term here is moral panic, which I’ve discussed in a few places but just briefly refers to a substantial overreaction to a small or nonexistent problem.

Mm. It’s a small or nonexistent problem – the fact that we (women) are being told we have to redefine ourselves in a way that entails including men as women on demand. If a man tells us he’s a woman we have to agree, or at least comply; if we refuse, punishment is swift. To us that is not a small problem.

Often the

Girls can’t “identify” their way out of having their genitals sliced off.

The death of a young woman in Sierra Leone, almost immediately after undergoing female genital mutilation, has sparked outrage and revived calls to end the practice.

The body of 21-year-old Maseray Sei was found on 20 December at Nyandeni village in Bonthe district, southern Sierra Leone, a day after the FGM took place. Sei’s family said that after the procedure the mother of two boys complained of a migraine and was in pain, with complications from FGM thought to be the cause, according to activists working on the case.

Maybe pointless mutilation of genitals isn’t such a good idea after all.

Sierra Leone has one of the

Dress your people in lacquer and rubber:

The sexology department at a Norwegian university headed by a trans-identified male and his wife prompted backlash after requiring students to participate in a fetish club as part of their research.

Zoologists can do research on animals without dressing up as animals. I don’t see why sexologists can’t do the same.

Tonje Kristin Jensen, a student at the University of Agder, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that she decided to forego a study trip in Oslo after receiving a letter providing a required dress code that included fetish gear on the theme of “lacquer and rubber.” The memo encouraged students to attend in erotic clothes, such as lace and thigh-high stockings.

Erotic … Read the rest

A letter to the Glinner update from Matt Osborne:

Mr. Linehan,

The following comment from an Alabama Democratic Party insider was just passed along to me:

“How are we going to talk to voters with a straight face after setting a quota for non-binary party officials?”

I have been sounding the alarm all this time, and now the pigeons are coming home to roost. This midterm election year is going to be awful for Democrats. I was just discussing the poor polling on all this gobbledygook with my local-political friends and said “every time another man cheats women out of their sports, Democrats lose ten House seats.” One of them responded by conveying that comment, which is less than

That’s an amazing story.

Innocent on grounds of inability to sweat m’lud.

Lawyers for a US woman who has accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault are seeking proof of the British royal’s alleged inability to sweat.

Virginia Giuffre’s legal team made the request as part of a civil case against the prince in a New York court.

Ms Giuffre, 38, alleges that Prince Andrew sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager at the homes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Prince Andrew has consistently denied the allegations.

In a 2019 interview with BBC Newsnight, he said a “problem” with her account was that a medical condition at the time meant he could not have been sweating, as she claims he was.

So … Read the rest

They just straight-up shamelessly lie about her.

When HBO announced its upcoming reunion special “Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts,” the star-studded lineup did not include You-Know-Who.

In the weeks leading up to the highly anticipated program, streaming New Year’s Day on HBO Max, not a single teaser, trailer or poster has featured “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, who has come under fire in recent years for repeatedly expressing anti-transgender views.

That’s a lie.

Rowling has been known to object to lies of that kind, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Los Angeles Times (normally a respected newspaper) issue a correction with apology.

She hasn’t “expressed anti-transgender views.” It’s not “anti” to point out that … Read the rest

Speaking of people who disagree –

Genius is still at it.

Following his clash with Kellie Jay-Keen over 'sex based rights', Ulrika in York tells James Max: "The word woman is our word."

"If you say trans women are women, you are erasing our sex class."@thejamesmax | @StandingforXX pic.twitter.com/RKW8JWogiS

— Talk (@TalkTV) December 31, 2021

Ulrika in York is a Twitter comrade; she gives him a good pasting, and he keeps coming back with “Yes but other people disagree!!”

You don’t say. What the hell does he think we’ve been doing all this time? We know other people disagree, and that they’ve been dismantling women’s rights because they disagree, and that’s why we’re fighting back.

Other people always disagree. That doesn’t mean they’re right. People … Read the rest

A random accident?

Knoxville’s Planned Parenthood building was engulfed in flames early Friday morning and is a total loss.

Fire crews were called about 6:40 a.m. as heavy smoke was coming out of the back of the structure, Assistant Chief Brent Seymour said. There were no injuries to report. The building was being renovated and the clinic had not been used in some time.

Seymour said it’s too early in the investigation, with parts of the building unsafe to enter, to be able to say what caused the fire.

We can make some educated guesses though.

In January 2021 someone fired a shotgun at the doors of this Planned Parenthood clinic, shattering the glass and lodging bullet holes in the

My god, this guy!

Shrill. You couldn’t make it up.

Oh sir, please sir, sorry sir, we’re sorry our shrill squeaking voices hurt your ears, but you see sir, we’re made that way sir, we have higher voices than you strong wise large better people do, which is why we have such a struggle to get people like you to listen to us, and why we don’t want to share all of our spaces and prizes and protections with the deep-voiced kind of people. We’re afraid they might assault us you see sir, because some of you have been known to do that sir. It’s probably because of our shrill voices sir, for which again we apologize sir, but … Read the rest

I wouldn’t call it reflection, exactly.

James Max reflects on his interview with Kellie-Jay Keen.

"I found a lot of what she said deeply uncomfortable. We've seen how minorities are treated in society. We've seen what happens when minorities are treated badly for being slightly different from the norm."@thejamesmax pic.twitter.com/vxPWl6p3lU

— Talk (@TalkTV) December 30, 2021

He doesn’t reflect on it so much as explain why he was right about it.

He tells us he found what Kellie Jay said deeply uncomfortable, and compared it to “the stereotypes and tropes that were used twenty years ago to describe gay people and to um not allow them the human rights that thankfully we have in today’s world” – about what’s … Read the rest