All entries by this author

Subject to campaigns of intimidation

Nov 22nd, 2021 9:47 am | By

What Rowling said in response to the three shits who posted her address on Twitter:

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Positioning and wading

Nov 22nd, 2021 9:29 am | By

The shamelessness of Pink News part 2:

The controversy comes after a turbulent few years for JK Rowling, who has repeatedly positioned herself at the centre of the UK’s toxic debate surrounding trans lives.

Just look at that – from Pink News! She hasn’t “positioned herself” anywhere, she has said what she thinks, as has Pink News. She’s allowed to say what she thinks. Pink News never shuts up about it, so why should she? Why should we? We have rights too, we even have lives. The toxic debate isn’t surrounding or encircling or about “trans lives” anyway, it’s about the claims of the new and ever-expanding trans ideology, especially where the claims conflict with the rights of women … Read the rest



Shameless

Nov 22nd, 2021 9:08 am | By

The unabashed mendacity of Pink News is a sight to behold.

It starts with the headline:

JK Rowling condemns actors who held trans rights protest outside her house

They didn’t just “hold a protest.” They tweeted a photo with her address in it.

Also I wonder how pleased the people of Pink News would be if people “held a protest” where they live.

Comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy staged a demonstration outside the Harry Potter author’s house on Friday (19 November) in protest against her long-condemned views on trans lives.

Long-condemned by whom? Besides Pink News and people incited by Pink News? And her views aren’t on “trans lives,” which is a … Read the rest



Recorded and subject to investigation

Nov 21st, 2021 5:22 pm | By
Recorded and subject to investigation

Essex Police are angry that members of the public replied to their Facebook post about Trans Day of Remembrance and the threats it contained.

I take it the asterisks are meant to indicate “Update” (so why not just say “update”?). It all looks a bit like entrapment, to be honest. First they post some stupid catastrophizing bullshit about nonexistent violence against trans people, and then they tell us they’ve recorded all our responses and will go all police on our asses if they don’t like them. They’re going to “investigate” if they deem any of the comments “offensive.”

Yes, it looks very much like entrapment. And for what? Not agreeing that men are women if they say they are.… Read the rest



Guest post: A definite bias against the American gun fetish

Nov 21st, 2021 12:02 pm | By

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on So it was reckful?

I admit I have a definite bias against the American gun fetish. I learned to handle firearms from WWII vets, none of whom carried firearms routinely. To this day if someone were to hand me a weapon I would inspect and clear it the way they learned to do it during inspection in the 1940’s.

I was a trauma surgeon for more than 25 years. In that time, I treated wounds made by 22 cal pistols and rifles, 38s, 9mm, 10mm, 45 cal colts, black powder muzzle loaders, 12 gauge shotguns, 30 cal long guns and the 5.56mm favored by many of the assault rifles in civilian … Read the rest



Behind the scenes

Nov 21st, 2021 11:21 am | By

Remember that BBC article by Caroline Lowbridge about the pressure on lesbians to pretend trans women are lesbians too? Jo Bartosch reports (in the Daily Mail because the Quality papers won’t) that Nancy Kelley tried to get the piece spiked.

The BBC won much praise for its investigation, which prompted some lesbians to express their anger at how they felt ostracised for wishing to form relationships only with women.

Campaigner Kat Howard wrote that she was ‘incredibly grateful to Caroline Lowbridge, and the BBC for this article’, adding: ‘We need help protecting young lesbians everywhere from an LGBT community that would rather see them silenced than stand up to the male perpetrators of assault.’

Yet now it has emerged that

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Fit, healthy, younger people unvaccinated by choice

Nov 21st, 2021 10:14 am | By

Anti-vaxxing has consequences.

Of course, there are people who have their vaccinations but still get sick. These people may be elderly or frail, or have underlying health problems. Those with illnesses affecting the immune system, particularly patients who have had chemotherapy for blood cancers, are especially vulnerable. Some unlucky healthy people will also end up on our general wards with Covid after being vaccinated, usually needing a modest amount of oxygen for a few days.

But the story is different on our intensive care unit. Here, the patient population consists of a few vulnerable people with severe underlying health problems and a majority of fit, healthy, younger people unvaccinated by choice. Watching the mix of patients coming in with

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A really important day

Nov 21st, 2021 6:32 am | By
A really important day

March 31 this year, Essex Police were busy marking and commemorating and making aware:

And yesterday was trans day of remembrance, with another round of social media announcing and posing for photos and Raising Awareness.

But women? Bah. Karens, all of them; Essex Police can’t be bothered with them.… Read the rest



Enough

Nov 20th, 2021 5:00 pm | By

Remember: Be Kind.

https://twitter.com/VictoriaPeckham/status/1462210482731896839

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Grown-ass QC says what now?

Nov 20th, 2021 11:28 am | By

This is just childish.

No it’s not like that! Of course it’s not!

“This thing that’s not like this other thing is like this other thing.”

Blackface is not comparable to using ordinary pronouns, so debating the two is also not comparable. The two things are just not similar enough to make a useful comparison. “Inclusion” of trans people doesn’t rely on forcing everyone to use mix … Read the rest



Women deserve it?

Nov 20th, 2021 10:15 am | By

It’s “Trans Day of Remembrance.”

But there haven’t been any. Not this year and not last year.

Do the police ever celebrate Women’s Remembrance Day? Do they ever get photos taken of themselves standing up and looking serious about the many murders of women that are committed every year?

Notice they don’t include sex in their “We will continue to act against those who target someone because of their religion, race, sexual … Read the rest



After feedback

Nov 20th, 2021 6:12 am | By

Is Stonewall’s face red?! Of course it wouldn’t dream of erasing mothers from the language. It was a typo.

Stonewall has dropped guidance advising groups on its workplace schemes to remove the word “mother” from their policies.

The lobby group said that it would no longer reward higher ranking scores to employers who replaced “mother” with gender-neutral alternatives.

Nancy Kelley, the Stonewall chief executive, denied in an interview that such a policy existed. “We’re not interested in removing or erasing the word ‘mother’,” she said. Kelley, who has two adopted children with her wife, added: “I’m a mum. I’m married to another mum. It’s a deeply emotive term. I would be really upset if my children didn’t call me Mum.”

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A form of religion

Nov 19th, 2021 4:55 pm | By

One or two items from Janice Turner’s conversation with Kathleen Stock:

Although Sussex had a radical history, the philosophy department was an outlier: relatively conservative, less prone to fashionable thinking. Her argumentative father had inadvertently prepared her for “lots of rude, bolshie men who just would sneer at you if you said something stupid”, but who, she adds, “are still the cleverest people I’ve ever met”. The English and gender studies departments thought the philosophers very dull. “We were laughed at because we believed in things like truth and objectivity. Philosophy at Sussex has never been trendy. Thank God – that’s the way I like it.”

Especially that kind of trendy. “Hahaha you believe in truth” – from people … Read the rest



So it was reckful?

Nov 19th, 2021 12:07 pm | By

All counts. Not even reckless endangerment. I’ve seen sober explanations that he had a good case for self-defense, but…not even “but you shouldn’t have been there with an assault rifle in the first place”?

I got nothin’.… Read the rest



Proportion

Nov 19th, 2021 11:56 am | By

Today, like every day, is trans day of something. This one is remembrance. Tomorrow is biceps and the next day is wood lice.

Cllr. Peter Kavanagh, Mayor of South Dublin County Council, paid tribute today to the county’s Transgender community and spoke about how they were disproportionately affected by the global Covid-19 pandemic. Mayor Kavanagh raised the Trans flag at County Hall in Tallaght to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, when the victims of transphobic violence are commemorated.

Trans people are disproportionately affected by the pandemic? Really? More so than mothers of small children, people with no money, homeless people, mothers of slightly bigger children, people who lose jobs because of lockdowns, people with health conditions that make them … Read the rest



The stuff of responsible, ethical journalism

Nov 19th, 2021 11:04 am | By

The Times on Project Veritas a week ago:

Hours after F.B.I. agents searched the homes of two former Project Veritas operatives last week, James O’Keefe, the leader of the conservative group, took to YouTube to defend its work as “the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism.”

“We never break the law,” he said, railing against the F.B.I.’s investigation into members of his group for possible involvement in the reported theft of a diary kept by President Biden’s daughter, Ashley. “In fact, one of our ethical rules is to act as if there are 12 jurors on our shoulders all the time.”

No, I’m sure Biden’s daughter gave them her diary of her own free will.

Project Veritas has long

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A landmark ruling against prior restraint

Nov 19th, 2021 10:34 am | By

Return of prior restraint:

A New York trial judge has temporarily blocked the New York Times from publishing some materials concerning the rightwing activist group Project Veritas, a rare step that the newspaper said violated decades of first amendment constitutional protections.

The order by Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester county supreme court covers memos written by a Project Veritas lawyer and obtained by the New York Times.

Remember the Pentagon Papers?

“This ruling is unconstitutional and sets a dangerous precedent,” Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, said in an emailed statement.

“When a court silences journalism, it fails its citizens and undermines their right to know,” he added. “The supreme court made that clear in the Pentagon Papers

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Pause for aesthetics

Nov 19th, 2021 10:14 am | By

It’s an outrage!

Richard Segovia’s house is as loud as the Latin rock music he teaches children to play in his basement studio. With colors ranging from jungle green and royal blue at the pavement to a red and yellow sunburst at the ridge, the otherwise modest Spanish-style home is essentially one enormous mural, a crowded portraitof long-gone musicians, Segovia’s family members, social activists, various psychedelia, and the odd jungle animal.

Segovia has lived in San Francisco’s Mission district since 1963, and he sees himself as a custodian of the neighborhood’s culture, specifically as the birthplace of Latin rock. (Carlos Santana, a family friend, grew up nearby.) But increasingly the 68-year old “Mayor of the Mission” finds himself face to

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The sadist at work

Nov 19th, 2021 7:42 am | By

The Daily Mail has a useful reminder of some of Adrian Harrop’s nastiest work. (Reading the piece also gives me an unpleasant awareness of the Mail’s conspicuous persecution of Meghan Markle via the sidebar – two headlines about her doing some unremarkable things but presented with hostile contempt. Ugly…and in fact quite similar to Harrop himself. Both Harrop and DM are relentless persecutors. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that they both target women.)

None of the GP’s alleged cyber victims were named. But in the case of A, he posted her full name and details of her job, and continued to do so even when she asked him to stop due to concerns for her safety.

He warned

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Pause the men

Nov 19th, 2021 5:44 am | By

They what?

Yesterday it emerged the Labour Party had suspended the membership of Gil House pending investigation for allegedly engaging in prejudicial conduct that was “grossly detrimental to the party”. Gil’s crime? Insisting that “only women experience the menopause”.

Perhaps the Labour Party was confused by the name? Perhaps they think it’s only men who experience the menopause because look it says it right there, men o pause. It’s a pause that men do. Could that be what the Labour Party was thinking? Because that would be less stupid than…

So the Labour Party has decided to be the Stupid Party. It’s impossible to dignify this insulting nonsense with anything less crude than STUPID. Punishing someone for saying only women … Read the rest