All entries by this author

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



For your listening pleasure

Nov 18th, 2021 4:56 pm | By

On today’s Woman’s Hour Emma Barnett asked Nancy Kelley, CEO of Stonewall, a lot of probing questions, and pushed for non-evasive replies. It’s the first segment and it lasts about 35 minutes. It’s good stuff.… Read the rest



Beyond a joke

Nov 18th, 2021 4:20 pm | By

Jo Bartosch on the BBC’s Politics Live comedy hour yesterday:

The moment of hilarity arrived when Ellie Mae O’Hagan, director of the think-tank CLASS, was asked by presenter Jo Coburn about the definition of ‘woman’. In response she said: ‘You know, I actually don’t know why some people are women and some people are men.’

After claiming her view was shared by most women (though who knows if they were women), O’Hagan then said that those who claim to be able to tell a person’s sex are ‘liars’.

And that’s why the human race has proved unable to reproduce over the past 300,000 years.

O’Hagan’s nonsensical comments were made during the course of a wider discussion on gender self-identification with

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You will be aware

Nov 18th, 2021 12:14 pm | By

Why Adrian is in the hot seat.

https://twitter.com/STILLTish/status/1461425909135773708

Look at that second one. “I did it because I’m so compassionate, unlike you, Karen!”

You wouldn’t want him handing you an aspirin, let alone anything more intrusive.… Read the rest



Debate informed by evidence

Nov 18th, 2021 11:37 am | By

Maya Forstater welcomes the end of No Debate:

“No debate” has been the longstanding position of Stonewall since it took up the cause of overwriting sex with by self-identified gender. It has refused all invitations to take part in discussion with those who disagree with its “trans women are women” position.

So when on Tuesday night Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley spoke alongside Naomi Cunningham, Chair of Sex Matters, and answered questions from members of the LGB Alliance, history was made. 

The debate was about what Stonewall calls “conversion therapy” and reasonable people call not encouraging teenagers to rush into permanent changes to their still-changing bodies.

The proposed law would make it a criminal offence for a therapist or other

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Folk hero

Nov 18th, 2021 11:10 am | By

David French on Kyle Rittenhouse and the self-defense defense:

The trial itself has not gone well for the prosecution, for reasons that relate to the nature of self-defense claims. Such claims are not assessed by means of sweeping inquiries into the wisdom of the actions that put the shooter into a dangerous place in a dangerous time. Instead, they produce a narrow inquiry into the events immediately preceding the shooting. The law allows even a foolish man to defend himself, even if his own foolishness put him in harm’s way.

But perhaps more so if he’s a white man, and a whole hell of a lot less so if he’s a black man. As for women, they don’t generally … Read the rest



Imagine getting the facts wrong

Nov 18th, 2021 4:45 am | By

This happened:

https://twitter.com/VictoriaPeckham/status/1460965687636152327 https://twitter.com/Docstockk/status/1461253380152639490

“Oh did I say ‘lacks a citation’? Of course I meant ‘cites.'”

Weasel.… Read the rest