All entries by this author
Mar 1st, 2024 7:23 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Lie down with rats, get up with fleas.
Lauren Boebert has said she is heartbroken over her teenage son’s arrest but that he will take responsibility for his actions and should be held accountable. The Colorado representative’s son is accused of taking part in a series of car break-ins and credit card thefts in his mother’s home state.
Trashy enough yet?
Tyler Boebert, 18, appeared in court virtually from jail on Wednesday but was later released to return in April. He is facing multiple felony charges.
The list of 22 charges include four felony charges of criminal possession of ID documents, one count of conspiracy to commit a felony, and over a dozen misdemeanour charges, the Rifle Police Department
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4 comments
Mar 1st, 2024 7:00 am |
By Ophelia Benson
So we’re literally not allowed to talk about LGB without any T. It’s literally mandatory to paste the T onto any mention of LGB. We will literally be called names and accused of evil intentions if we try to talk about LGB without any T.
… Read the rest
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7 comments
Feb 29th, 2024 5:14 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Meanwhile…
Not a joke, apparently. He has a public post about it on Facebook.
I am delighted to announce that I have been accepted as a UN Women UK delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
The UN CSW is the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.
And it sees fit to disempower women by giving their roles to men.… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Feb 29th, 2024 4:36 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
More on the Justin Webb issue.
Also it’s about what we’re allowed to say, and according to whom.
It’s not a trivial matter, when and if we’re allowed to tell the truth about who is a woman and who is not. It’s extremely important and extremely basic. It’s shocking and dangerous that a news organization, especially one with the clout of the BBC, is telling its personnel that … Read the rest
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4 comments
Feb 29th, 2024 11:33 am |
By Ophelia Benson
BBC to its talking heads: you WILL say men are women; that’s an order.
The BBC has upheld a complaint against Today presenter Justin Webb after he said “trans women, in other words males”.
Webb made the comment during a discussion about new International Chess Federation (FIDE) guidelines on 22 August last year regarding whether being biologically male can give players an advantage in the game. A listener complained that the comment amounted to Webb giving his personal view on a controversial matter in breach of the BBC’s requirements on impartiality.
The only sense in which it’s “controversial” to say a man is a man is the one where tiresome people make a big stupid stink about saying a … Read the rest
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7 comments
Feb 29th, 2024 10:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Telegraph:
Transgender women who are convicted of a crime must be recorded as men if they have not legally changed their gender, Downing Street has said.
The intervention comes after The Telegraph revealed that Scarlet Blake, 26, a male-born transgender woman who was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a stranger and killing a cat, has been recorded as a female criminal in official statistics.
And that’s not ok even if he has “legally changed his gender” – which is frankly a meaningless phrase. If “gender” is just the social bit then why tf would it justify falsifying the statistics? If it’s sex we’re back where we started: no he is not.
The Prime Minister’s spokesman
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2 comments
Feb 29th, 2024 10:43 am |
By Ophelia Benson
This is how we get inched into it.
That’s not good news at all. Who cares if they have “legally changed their gender” or not? It doesn’t matter. Men’s crimes should not be reported as women’s crimes.
Laws aren’t magic. It’s futile to pass a law saying dung is ice cream; you still don’t want to eat it. You could pass a law saying Mars is an easy 5 hour trip by plane, but it wouldn’t be true. Laws can change some … Read the rest
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1 Comment »
Feb 29th, 2024 10:05 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Joan Smith writes:
A couple of months ago, it was revealed that 1,151 police officers in England and Wales are under investigation for sexual or domestic abuse, including 657 of Couzens’s former Met colleagues. One in seven of the overall total has been allowed to continue working as usual while 428 have been placed on restricted duties. Only 378 have been suspended. Allegations against officers are so widespread that the Met Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, admitted last year that he couldn’t guarantee that a woman reporting a rape wouldn’t be interviewed by a predator. Is anyone surprised that so many rape investigations go nowhere?
It has been clear for a long time that there are failures at every
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6 comments
Feb 29th, 2024 9:56 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Beeb:
Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens should never have been a police officer and opportunities were missed to stop him, an inquiry has said. A radical overhaul of police vetting and recruitment is needed now, the independent review found.
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Police “repeatedly failed” to spot warning signs about his unsuitability to be an officer, the inquiry said, and it identified at least five incidents which were not reported to police. The inquiry said this included evidence Couzens allegedly committed a very serious sexual assault against a child, described as barely in her teens, before his policing career began.
Yebbut boys will be boys. It’s just nature. You can’t correct nature. You want the cops to be tough and … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Feb 28th, 2024 11:49 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Many doctors share our concerns.
Doctor groups like the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) and the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS) came out swinging.
Doctor’s groups aren’t the same thing as patients’ groups, though. And doctors’ groups aren’t even the same thing as groups of doctors. Doctors’ groups are special interest bureaucracies, and the policies they advocate are not always in line with the interests of the patients at the receiving end of their respective fields of medicine, and they’re often not even in line with the majority of doctors working in the fields they purport to represent. Doctors’ interests diverge from patients’ interests all the time. That’s why medical scandals keep happening. And … Read the rest
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2 comments
Feb 28th, 2024 11:17 am |
By Ophelia Benson
James Esses tells us that incloooosion stretches even to the pet industry.
There’s a handbook.
This Handbook sets out to members of staff the policies and terms & conditions they must adhere to at work. Pets at Home describe this as “our expectations of you as one of our colleagues”.
At the beginning, this reads like any other corporate virtue-signalling manifesto (which, unfortunately, are ten a penny these days). Pets at Home state: “Diversity and inclusion is an important part of who we are and what we do…We aim to create an inclusive experience for our colleagues where everyone can connect to our purpose, be themselves and make their best contributor to our business”.
Everyone can be themselves? What if … Read the rest
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3 comments
Feb 28th, 2024 10:26 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Should we just give up and hand it all over to the bots?
Gemini is essentially Google’s version of the viral chatbot ChatGPT. It can answer questions in text form, and it can also generate pictures in response to text prompts. Initially, a viral post showed this recently launched AI image generator create an image of the US Founding Fathers which inaccurately included a black man. Gemini also generated German soldiers from World War Two, incorrectly featuring a black man and Asian woman.
Yebbut diversidee.
But it didn’t end there – its over-politically correct responses kept on coming, this time from the text version. Gemini replied that there was “no right or wrong answer” to a question about whether Elon
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2 comments
Feb 28th, 2024 9:03 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Two doctors write in The National Post [Canada]:
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s recently announced policies on restricting transgender medical interventions for minors have generated much outrage, notwithstanding a subsequent Leger poll that suggested more Canadians than not agree with her proscriptions.
Doctor groups like the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) and the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS) came out swinging, each issuing strongly worded statements expressing grave concerns. Dr. Sam Wong, head of the AMA’s pediatrics section, argued that “this is poor legislation that is targeting a small percentage of population that has already been targeted by society … and the government is piling on.”
But maybe, just maybe, it’s not “targeting” people to protect them from damaging physical interventions.
The general
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3 comments
Feb 27th, 2024 6:20 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Guardian explains its “Woman killed man” lie. The explain is: everybody else was doing it.
“It’s not our fault, we relied on an agency report, and we saw no reason to question the claim that a woman had murdered a man by hitting him on the head and strangling him shut up shut up shut UP.”
Breathtakingly feeble and incompetent.… Read the rest
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4 comments
Feb 27th, 2024 3:26 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
As for the Metro piece itself, by two compliant female reporters, it’s as snide and sneery and dumb as you’d expect.
JK Rowling has sparked backlash over her Sky News criticism for referring to murderer Scarlet Blake as a woman.
Well, she’s “sparked backlash” among the dimwits who are so ready and eager to be sparked that they can’t be bothered to think about what they’re saying.
A clip of the broadcast was shared on the news channel’s X page, and re-posted by Harry Potter author Rowling, who criticised them for not stating that Blake was transgender in the 55-second clip of the show.
The issue is not that he’s “transgender”; the issue is that he is not a woman… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
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