BBC weirdness. It does a story on a huge protest in Trafalgar Square organized by Tommy Robinson…

Thousands of supporters of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson have filled Trafalgar Square in central London after a march. He claimed the event was the “biggest patriotic rally” the UK had ever seen.

A counter-protest by Stand Up To Racism and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Project also took place in London. The Metropolitan Police said a major operation was in place to “keep the peace” between the two protests, amid fears of serious disruption.

But don’t worry – that doesn’t exhaust the full list of protests.

A Trans Pride event was also held in the capital.

Ok, got it. Two opposing rallies that could have clashed with each other, and oh by the way there was also the 40 thousandth Trans Pride march.

There’s a photo of the Tommy Robinson march and…a photo of the Trans Pride march.

There’s no further mention of the Trans Pride march, which clearly has nothing to do with anything, but by god a photo of it is right up there near the top, because HEY, sorry to interrupt, but TRANS PRIDE.

Many many short BBC paragraphs down there is finally a photo of the counter-protest. Obviously the unrelated TRANS PRIDE march gets top billing while the competing march that’s actually relevant is shunted to the bottom of the page.

The BBC is permanently drunk these days.

Day 1, selective outrage; day 2, selective apologies.

The organisers of the Paris Olympics have apologised after a drag queen parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper featured in the opening ceremony.

What, did it get there because someone opened the wrong box? Was it supposed to be Vermeer’s Milkmaid or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers?

The tableau, which recreated the biblical scene of Christ and his apostles, included drag artists and a naked singer. It was heavily criticised by politicians and members of the Catholic Church.

Hang on. What does that mean? How does one “recreate” a biblical scene of anything? Paintings that illustrate bible stories are just that – illustrations. They’re not photographic records of historical events, they’re imaginative illustrations of imaginative stories.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life expressed his disgust in the right-wing daily, Il Giornale, on Sunday.

The archbishop spoke of the importance of the Olympics and sporting values in promoting fraternity and equality before saying: “This high ideal has been besmirched by a blasphemous mockery of one of Christianity’s holiest moments.”

Dude. Get a grip. The painting is just one guy’s idea of what a purported “last supper” might have looked like. That’s all. It’s not a historical record of the event itself. The parody is not the painting itself.

The taunting of women, of course, goes unmentioned. The archbishop approves of fraternity but sorority apparently not so much.

Gotta have men in rape crisis centers says lunatic.

Biological men should still be able to work in rape crisis centres despite a scandal over a trans woman’s running of survivor services, a leading charity boss has claimed.

Sandy Brindley, the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, confirmed that Mridul Wadhwa, a male who identifies as female and is chief executive of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, was not currently at work following a damning employment tribunal ruling.

Emphasis on “currently” no doubt.

Ms Brindley, who has previously championed Wadhwa as an “amazing sister”, denied that her organisation had any involvement in the appointment and declined to confirm whether the chief executive was suspended or on leave. She said she believed victims of sexual violence should be able to make “informed choices” about the sex of support workers.

However, she rejected claims that there was no place for trans women in rape crisis centres, despite admitting the employment tribunal ruling had been “damning and damaging.”

Well she’s wrong. You know why? Because women don’t want men for this job, but in addition to that, the problem with letting men work in rape crisis centers is the fact that they want to and feel entitled to push for the right to. It’s the fact that they put their wants ahead of the needs of the women. That should disqualify them all by itself. Women who’ve been raped don’t need to encounter men who put themselves first in a rape crisis center. That’s pretty much the last thing they need.

Marion Calder, a director at the For Women Scotland campaign group, said Ms Brindley had serious questions to answer over events at the Edinburgh centre. “She has previously described Mridul Wadhwa as a ‘warrior for women’s rights’ and repeatedly championed him, as well as the ludicrous notion that people can change sex,” she said.

“The culture at the centre was no secret and it was obvious for years that the needs of vulnerable service users were being sidelined for this deranged ideology. For her to claim that there is still a place for men in rape crisis centres shows she has learned nothing and means many women will simply not be able to trust these vital services.”

That’s how it looks from here.

PBS asks and answers:

Are the 2024 Paris Olympics gender equal? That depends how you measure it.

Well how about measuring it as the same number of women competing as men competing? Crazy, I know, but that’s what I understand “equal” to mean in this context.

The last time the French capital played host to the Olympic Games, 135 women competed out of the more than 3,000 athletes – a participation rate of about 4.4 percent.

A century later, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has dubbed the 2024 Paris Games the #GenderEqualOlympics, with half of the athlete spots available to men and half to women, the organization says.

Cool; do they mean the “women” part?

The reality is more complex. Experts say that while the IOC has made substantial progress in leveling the playing field for women in its decades long push for gender parity, there is still a lot of work to do, for women, transgender and nonbinary athletes.

Nonononononono that’s not the question at all. Women; not “transgender and nonbinary.” Focus.

This year’s Games are the first to impose a cap on the number of participating athletes, which had steadily grown to more than 11,000 at Tokyo 2020. The IOC has since limited the Games to 10,500 athlete spots, half of which were designated for men and half for women. This year’s game schedule also works to balance the number of women’s and men’s events held daily.

The reasons are not always to do with fairness to women, you won’t be amazed to learn.

Skeet shooting was an open sport in Barcelona in 1992, when Zhang Shan, a Chinese woman, won the gold medal. Subsequently, skeet shooting became segregated by gender.

“There’s nothing in the record that says, ‘And then once a woman won, we decided to have gendered categories,’ but the timing is notable,” Donnelly said.

“Oops, a woman won, that won’t do – we’ll have to give them their own competition so that men will be guaranteed wins.”

In striving for gender parity at the Olympics, the IOC has also reinforced a gender binary that categorizes athletes as male or female, experts say. That overlooks transgender and nonbinary athletes, whose participation in sport is often contested or flat out banned.

Fuck off. All the way off. Yes, now, right now.

Reduxx tells us:

Two athletes competing at the Paris Olympics as “women” were previously disqualified from a women’s world championship for having “XY chromosomes.” Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan are scheduled to compete in Olympic women’s boxing next week despite past questions surrounding their biological sex.

The Women’s World Boxing Championships took place in March of 2023 and was hosted in New Delhi, India. A total of 324 boxers from 64 nations competed during the 10-day trial, marking the largest participation in any iteration of the championship ever recorded.

However, the grand event was marred by controversy after Umar Kremlev, president of the International Boxing Association (IBA), announced the disqualification of multiple boxers from the championship.

Kremlev said that IBA executives had met towards the championship’s grand finale to discuss “fairness among athletes and professionalism,” after concerns were raised about the biological sex of some participants. He added that after “a series of DNA-tests,” the IBA “uncovered athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women.”

I wonder why it’s always women they’re pretending to be. Why don’t women pretend to be men so that they can compete against men? Don’t women want to punch the crap out of men the way men want to punch the crap out of women?

Despite having faced the disqualification just last year, both boxers will be competing in Paris as female boxers.

How sweet.

Framing.

The Associated Press:

In an unprecedented display of inclusivity, drag queens took center stage at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, showcasing the vibrant and influential role of the French LGBTQ+ community — while also attracting criticism over a tableau reminiscent of “The Last Supper.”

It’s astounding, isn’t it? Mockery of women is “inclusivity” – the only problem is bringing “the last supper” into it. One mustn’t tease religion, but jeering at women is inclusive and hilarious and edgy.

Le Filip, the recent winner of “Drag Race France,” expressed their positive “surprise” and “pride” at the ceremony’s scale and representation.

“I thought it would be a five-minute drag event with queer representation. I was amazed. It started with Lady Gaga, then we had drag queens, a huge rave, and a fire in the sky,” they said. “It felt like a crowning all over again. I am proud to see my friends and queer people on the world stage.”

Yeah, mockery of women on the world stage is brilliant, isn’t it. Allons enfants!

The opening ceremony came as drag and the voguing nightclub scene in France has experienced a revival. The cabaret club Madame Arthur, founded in 1946 in the ashes of World War II, is one of the world’s oldest continually running LGBTQ+ theaters. It opened as Europe was only just beginning to understand the extent of the widespread murder of members of the queer community in WWII and is currently experiencing a massive renaissance.

Drag is not just a pastime; for many minority French communities who feel alienated over tensions arising from divisive politics and scars from the anti-gay marriage protests a decade ago, it’s a statement of defiance. Many gay Black and Arab youths — especially those from Paris’ less affluent and religiously conservative suburbs — and others who feel a sense of disconnect with French society find voguing and drag events safe places where their identities can be expressed without fear of reprisal.

No mention at all of the mockery of women. Imagine the AP driveling on this way about a blackface routine at the Olympics opening ceremony – it wouldn’t happen.

Politico on Vance’s bumpy week:

THE VANCE CATFIGHT — The WSJ editorial board is joining the pile-on over Sen. JD VANCE’s (R-Ohio) comments about “childless cat ladies.”

In a tough piece posted last night, Paul Gigot and colleagues call the comment “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”

This is the fly in the ointment for political hopefuls who campaign on misogyny – they forget that women get to vote and that they’re quite a large demographic, aka half the population.

But the most interesting bit is:

The dive into Vance’s transformation from Trump hater to Trump running mate continues with this NYT piece surfacing correspondence between Vance and a transgender friend. “He’s just a bad man,” Vance writes about Trump in 2016. “A morally reprehensible human being.” He also tells his friend, “The more white people feel like voting for trump, the more black people will suffer. I really believe that.”

So he knows. He knows Trump is just a bad human being. He knows and he’s doing this anyway. Quite the morally reprehensible human being himself then.

The BBC is obsessed with drag. It currently has a long, photo-rich piece on men dressed up as parody women, which must be somewhere around its 5 thousandth piece on the subject over the past month.

For Danny Beard, though, the real magic of Hastings’ work is about championing the diversity of local drag queens who haven’t been given – or don’t want – a platform like Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

Ah yes, championing the diversity of local drag queens. Not championing the diversity of local women – god, how boring would that be??? – but of men mocking them.

I wonder why the BBC doesn’t have a parallel obsession with blackface?

Originally a comment by Jim Baerg on Stuck in presentism.

It was only with Kepler’s elliptical orbits that a heliocentric model predicted planetary motions better than a geocentric model.

Galileo’s observation of Jupiter’s moons showed that there are at least some objects that definitely orbit something other than the earth. The phases of Venus are hard (impossible ?) to explain in a non-heliocentric model.

For a non-dogmatic thinker, it was really only the combination of all of those developments that would remove reasonable doubt about heliocentrism. Though the lack of observable parallax of stars bothered scientists until measurements became good enough to detect the parallax in the 19th century.

Similarly in the case of continental drift/plate tectonics. There was reasonable doubt until the 1960s. It was accumulated data better explained by plate tectonics that tipped earth scientists into general acceptance of plate tectonics.

Honest present day scientists can try to look at what evidence was available to their predecessors of a given time to judge what they might have believed under the circumstances.

How to apply similar considerations to ethical issues is another matter.

Trump has a new fixation: Hannibal Lecter. Makes sense.

Trump mentioned Hannibal Lecter again last night, during a rally in North Carolina. During a rambling tangent about immigrants, Trump said: “They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming from all over the world, from prisons and jails, and mental institutions and insane asylums. You know, they go crazy when I say, ‘The late great Hannibal Lecter,’ OK? They say, ‘Why would he mention Hannibal Lecter? He must be cognitively in trouble.’ No no no, these are real stories. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lamb [sic]. He’s a lovely man. He’d love to have you for dinner.”

These stories really are stories, yes, but that doesn’t make them true accounts of real people. Why would Trump keep mentioning a fictional murderer?

Trump said more or less the same thing during his speech at the Republican national convention last week. And several times before that, stretching all the way back to May.

As…one does?

Trump’s unending Hannibal references are so overwhelmingly confusing that it has sent the internet running to the hills in search of something, anything, that might explain why the next potential president of the world’s biggest superpower keeps repeating the same baffling non-sequitur every time he gets near a microphone. 

Wellll there’s your answer right there. He’s both stupid and ignorant, so he gets stupid ideas and then he sticks to them. There’s no more to it than that. He’s every boring gasbag who thinks he’s funny you’ve ever sat next to on a bus or at a dinner. That’s all.

Trump doesn’t want to debate Harris. Of course he doesn’t.

In a statement released Thursday night, Trump’s campaign explained that they would be putting any future presidential debates on hold.

“Given the continued political chaos surrounding Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrat Party, general election debate details cannot be finalized until Democrats formally decide on their nominee,” said Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung.

Childish.

“There is a strong sense by many in the Democrat party—namely Barack Hussein Obama—that Kamala Harris is a Marxist fraud who cannot beat President Trump, and they are still holding out for someone ‘better,’” said Cheung. “Therefore, it would be inappropriate to schedule things with Harris because Democrats very well could still change their minds.”

Still childish.

Despite Trump’s repeated attempts to avoid going head-to-head with Harris, she has continued to push for a debate on September 10. “Voters deserve to see the split screen that exists on a debate stage,” she wrote in a post on X Thursday. “I’m ready. So let’s go.”

It occurs to me there’s an advantage in her having been a prosecutor. It means she’s had a lot of practice dealing with verbally and legally skilled opponents face to face in real time. That’s an advantage Hillary Clinton didn’t have. I bet it will come in handy. I doubt Captain Blowfish will be able to rattle her.

Oh shit. Half of Jasper has burned up.

I haven’t been there but I know people who have, and loved it.

Huge, fast-moving wildfires have destroyed up to half of the historic Canadian town of Jasper, officials say, as firefighters try to save as many buildings as possible. Entire streets have been levelled by the blazes in Alberta province, with video showing smouldering rubble where homes once stood.

…

During a news conference on Thursday, a tearful Alberta Premier Danielle Smith struggled at times to recount the scale of the damage, but said “potentially 30 to 50%” of buildings had been destroyed.

“There is no denying that this is the worst nightmare for any community,” she said, adding that Jasper National Park had been “a source of pride” for many generations. Ms Smith became visibly emotional as she described the beauty of the park and its significance to the community, which relies largely on tourism. Some 2.5 million people visit the park, and nearby Banff National Park, each year.

Beautiful places are beautiful, and we’re allowed to love them and mourn them.

Hundreds of firefighters from around the world have been deployed to help with the response, but officials warn the extent of the damage is still emerging. The focus on Thursday, they said, was on containing the towering flames which engulfed the town from two sides.

Pierre Martel, director for the national fire management programme at Parks Canada, said the fire was started by a lightning storm and escalated late on Wednesday as it was fanned by powerful winds. “It [was] just a monster at that point,” Mr Martel said. “There are no tools we have in our tool box to deal with it.”

Meanwhile there’s another one of those raging Northern California fires devouring all in its path.

A rare fire tornado has ripped through bushland in northern California, as the state’s largest wildfire this year doubled in size overnight and burned out of control.

The Park fire, which started on Wednesday, has already burned through more than 164,000 acres of land northeast of Chico, and was 3% contained on Friday, Cal Fire said.

It’s way too close to Chico now. I have an internet friend who lives in Chico – some of you probably know her too. She had a go-bag ready by the door but as of last night the fire was cutting off some escape routes. I hope she’s out.

The Park fire has grown exponentially since it sparked on Wednesday, growing from about 1,400 acres on Wednesday near Chico, California, spreading about 45,500 acres by Thursday into California’s Central Valley, before tripling in size by Friday.

The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for northern Sacramento Valley, and warned high winds and low humidity on Friday could combine to “cause new fire starts and ongoing wildfires to … grow rapidly and dangerously in size and intensity”.

Not the future any more.

Dear BBC droning on and on about drag queens again.

When Sab Samuel became the first drag queen to read children’s stories to youngsters at UK libraries it sparked protests across the country.

Oh no, those horrible naughty people who aren’t particularly thrilled to see mockery of women made a feature of libraries.

Sab, who is better known for their stage name Aida H Dee, is used to being challenged. Growing up, they were too scared to go to school. Sab said bullies attacked them while teachers said they “could not do anything to help”.

Everything changed for Sab, they said, when they performed in drag as an evil villainess in their Bath school play at the age of 13. They stood on stage and decided to be unabashedly themselves.

Unabashedly evil eh?

At the end, they were rewarded with a standing ovation and some of their previous enemies praised their courage. This spurred them on to launch the UK’s first drag queen story time which took place in Bristol in 2017.

Hero! Making contempt for women official!

Now Sab tours the country performing at theatres and libraries. “It’s not just for LGBT+ kids, it’s for everyone. Everyone should feel proud of who they are,” they said.

But he’s not proud of who he is, he’s proud of playacting being someone else. Acting is an art and it’s fine to be proud of it, but it’s silly to conflate it with who-they-are.

There are many more paragraphs of this glurge. I’ve learned to hate the BBC.

Originally a comment by Sonderval on Activists shocked to learn of other views.

Well duh, what would you expect it to reflect? Your views?

Yes, people probably expect exactly that because they think that different from all people in the past, their current moral and ethical values are the endpoint of ethics evolution. It is totally inconceivable to most people that some things we today take for granted may be viewed as horribly wrong in the future. Even if you point out that people 200 years ago thought the same thing, they still do not see the relativity of the situation.

Furthermore, they also do not see how they stand on the shoulders of past people to actually arrive at their moral values. They all assume that, had they lived 300 years ago, of course they would have been horrified at cat burnings or public executions. Ask any scientist and they will most probably tell you that back in the days of Galilei, of course they would have immediately been convinced by the arguments that earth moved around the sun. (Many of the same scientists will also tell you how “sex is binary” is of course wrong….)

Almost no-one tends to ask the question “Which practice that is common today will horrify people 200 years from now?” or “Why, if I had lived in the past, do I believe that I would still have my modern values despite the fact that they agree with and were formed by the world around me?” The closest they may come to this is talking about “the right side of history” and assuming that in the future, all of their values will be seen as the correct ones.

But actually thinking about the fact that all of us are probably doing something that “the right side of history” will view as wrong is rarely done.

We want Trump to lose, right? So this is good news:

Barack and Michelle Obama endorse Kamala Harris for president

In a joint statement announcing the endorsement, the Obamas praised Harris and listed her accomplishments.

“But Kamala has more than a resume,” the statement said. “She has the vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands. There is no doubt in our mind that Kamala Harris has exactly what it takes to win this election and deliver for the American people.”

…

Obama and Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, have been in touch regularly, and he has been serving as a sounding board for her as he has over the 20 years they’ve known each other, a source told CNN earlier this week.

Obama didn’t immediately endorse Harris following President Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he was not seeking reelection.

“I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges,” the former president said in a statement at the time.

According to the source, Obama believed it was important for the Democratic Party to have a legitimate process by which delegates would select their new nominee. An Obama adviser told CNN that the former president was taking the same approach as he did during the 2020 Democratic primary, watching closely with the intent of being able to unify the party when a nominee is chosen – whether it was Harris or someone else.

Not using his clout to affect the selection, but waiting to use it once the selection is made. Seems sensible.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Where’s the mud?

Lady Mondegreen is absolutely right — idealising Nature (with a captal ’N’) as something greater than human beings was very much part of Romanticism in all its forms (Wordsworth, for example), though Constable – unlike Turner – tends to prefer more ‘human’ landscapes. Before Romanticism, there were the 17th & 18th century landscapes that harked back very obviously and nostalgically to the pastoral tradition in poetry – ‘Nymphs & shepherds dance no more/ By sandy Ladon’s lilied banks…’), or the landscapes that seemed to be painted from the point of view of a landowner, high up and fondly contemplating his domain.

And it is also the case that Chinese & Japanese landscape painting (which I hugely admire) was idealised, although in a very different (mostly Taoist) way.

I see no problem with providing some sort of ‘context’ to any work of art, so long as it is thoughtful & illuminating, and not a sort of dissolution of the quiddity of works of art into sets of economic, social, and institutional influences which are regarded as wholly determining the works. John Barrell has some fine books on landscape painting, and on that marvellous poet John Clare, the son of an impoverished farm labourer who still has not had his due.

Ew.

It’s revolting.

More of the same, or no?

The National Gallery will display John Constable’s famous painting ‘The Hay Wain’ as a “contested landscape” at an upcoming exhibition.

The 1821 painting is a British classic, depicting a rural landscape near Constable’s native Suffolk. The idyllic scene shows a cart and horse travelling through the tranquil River Stour.

But some critics say the painting conceals a dark secret. Not present in the scene are the poorer workers of the time, many of whom were suffering from hunger and poverty.

…

The new exhibition will attempt to explain the full social context of the painting. It will be displayed alongside satirical images from the period which give another perspective on the politics of the time.

I think I would find that interesting, at least if it were done well. It doesn’t seem quite as much pointing out the obvious as the “Oh no the Albert Memorial is reactionary” item does.

Maybe that’s because I tend to react to idyllic rural scenes the same way myself. If they’re too idyllic I tend to want some mucky pigs somewhere in the picture.

19th century monument reflects 19th century views, exclaims pack of fools. Well duh, what would you expect it to reflect? Your views?

Prince Albert’s memorial in Kensington is “problematic” and “highly offensive”, drawing on “racial stereotypes” that reflect a “Victorian view of the world that differs from mainstream views held today”, its presentist custodians at The Royal Parks charity say (Evening Standard, GB News, Telegraph).

That’s because it was created by people who had the views that people had then as opposed to the views that people have now. I think you’ll find that’s a general pattern. It’s difficult to adopt the views of people a century or two in the future because you don’t know what they are going to be. Do you see what I mean? That’s a closed box to us. If we knew what they were, and we agreed with them, they would be our views. We don’t know what they will be, so we can neither agree nor disagree with them, because of the not knowing.

The Royal Parks have now offered a presentist critique of the monument, with the four statues that represent Asia, Africa, America and Europe described as reflective of a “Victorian view of European supremacy”.

“Representations of certain continents draws on racial stereotypes that are now considered offensive,” updated information about the plinth now reads on the Royal Parks website.

The page continues: “Though the Empire has traditionally been celebrated as a symbol of British supremacy, many today consider this view as problematic because colonialism often relied on the oppression and exploitation of people, resources and cultures.”

Please, point out the obvious some more.

News media continue to lie about men who commit crimes of violence. Brighton and Hove News for example:

Brighton woman, 70, appears before court charged with murdering husband

Brighton woman, 70, is of course not a woman.

A 70-year-old Brighton woman has appeared in court by video link charged with murdering her husband in their Kemp Town flat. Joanna Rowland-Stuart was aided by a British Sign Language interpreter at Lewes Crown Court this morning (Wednesday 24 July).

Rowland-Stuart, formerly known as John Stuart, appeared by video link from Downview prison, in Surrey, but did not enter a plea over the death of her husband Andrew Rowland-Stuart.

Mr Rowland-Stuart was a former lorry driver previously known as Angie or Angela Rowland, Angie or Angela Rowland-Stuart and Andy or Andrew Rowland.

Oops, they slipped up there – a stray “Mr” spoils the game.

The emergency services were called to the couple’s 15th-floor home in Lavender Street, Brighton, shortly after 7.30pm on Monday 27 May. Despite paramedics’ efforts to save 70-year-old Mr Rowland-Stuart, he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police arrested Joanna Rowland-Stuart, a former transgender rep and a former director of the LGBT Community Safety Forum, on suspicion of murder.

So much for the LGBT Community Safety Forum, eh?

The B&H Gazette may have a mole in its ranks, because it goes on to provide what looks like a very sarcastic pair of photos, first this one captioned Andrew

and then this one captioned Joanna:

Rowland-Stuart remains in custody, awaiting trial.

Update: Andrew is one person and “Joanna” is another, so the photos aren’t all that sarcastic. Thanks to John Reed for catching my dopy error.