Sigh. Religion is good for people.

The official death toll from this year’s Hajj pilgrimage has soared to almost 500 and the true toll could be more than double that as reports emerged that as many as 600 Egyptian worshipers perished on the route to Mecca amid extreme heat.

At least 14 Malaysians, 165 Indonesians, 68 Jordanians, 35 Pakistanis, 35 Tunisians, 11 Iranians and 98 Indians have died, according to authorities in each country. A further 22 Jordanians are hospitalized and 16 are still missing, the Jordanian Foreign Ministry said.

Dozens of Iranians have also been hospitalized due to heatstroke and other conditions, the Iranian Red Crescent said Wednesday, according to Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Why doesn’t their god intervene? Allah could make the haj optional, or forbid it altogether, or make a rule that it has to happen in the cooler months. Hell, he’s Allah, he could just turn on the cosmic air conditioning. Or sprinkle everyone with lovely cooling water.

The death tolls are expected to rise much further, as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have yet to release official figures. Additionally, the governments are only aware of pilgrims who have registered and traveled to Mecca as part of their country’s quota – more deaths are feared among unregistered pilgrims.

This is not a benevolent god.

Hajj season changes every year according to the Islamic calendar and this year it fell in June, one of the hottest months in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia advised pilgrims against performing the “stoning of the devil” ritual between certain hours after temperatures reached an extreme 49 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit).

Hajj officials asked pilgrims to carry umbrellas and stay hydrated amid the harsh conditions while the Saudi army deployed more than 1,600 personnel with medical units specifically for heatstroke and 30 rapid response teams. Another 5,000 health and first aid volunteers took part.

Or they could just skip the whole damn thing, but nooooooooo, that would never do. Allah made the rules back in the 7th century and Allah does not revise. Shut up and die, submissives.

Can we spot the flaw?

These imbeciles should book their trip to Kabul immediately.

Update: On the other hand Oli in London needs to date his sources: this is from 2019 and not in London but Amsterdam. So why are the signs in English? I don’t know – possibly because English is the lingua franca in the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

Oh by the way

Reports of domestic abuse made to Women’s Aid in the Republic of Ireland reached a record high in 2023. The charity said there had been an 18% increase in disclosures of domestic abuse to it compared to the previous year. This, it added, was the most it had received in its 50-year history.

A Cathal Crotty in every home, yeah?

On Wednesday, Women’s Aid also said they had heard from service users that their partners or ex-partners were subjecting them to a broad and brutal pattern of abuse. Among these, women reported assaults with weapons, constant surveillance, and monitoring, relentless put downs and humiliations and the taking and sharing of intimate images online.

There was also complete control over all family finances, sexual assault, rape and being threatened with theirs or their children’s lives.

Ok but it’s only women. Let’s talk about our trans siblings instead.

Still not making any kind of sense.

BBC:

Cathal Crotty, 22, attacked 24-year-old Natasha O’Brien, punching her six times, after she asked him to stop shouting homophobic abuse. Ms O’Brien’s injuries included a broken nose and bruising. She told the court she has suffered nightmares and panic attacks.

Crotty was given a three-year suspended sentence on Thursday. The judge described the attack as a “cowardly, vicious, unprovoked” assault. However, he said the defendant “must be given credit” for his guilty plea and told the court he had “no doubt” that if Crotty was jailed his army “career is over”.

Where is the “must” in “must be given credit” for pleading guilty? If it’s a legal “must” that’s one thing, but if it’s supposed to be a moral one – get out of here.

And as for fretting about the end of his army career – are you out of your MIND?

Does it not occur to this nightmare of a judge that armies don’t need or want soldiers who like to beat up random women for a hobby? That war crimes are not the goal? That recreational aggression is not the highway to solidiery excellence?

There’s that, but even more there’s the stomach-turning sympathy for the horrible man who wrecked a woman’s body and life, at the expense of the woman he smashed up.

The Irish Defence Forces, which has begun internal proceedings in relation to Crotty now that the court case is over, said it “unequivocally condemns any actions by serving personnel that are contrary to or do not reflect our values”. It added that “any conviction in a civilian court may have implications for the retention and service of members” of the defence forces.

Yesterday I thought they’d said they were starting the process of booting him out, but apparently not. They’re starting the process of considering what to do about him.

Keir Starmer two days ago:

Keir Starmer today:

No no no no we can’t have women saying it, we can’t have Rosie Duffield saying it, we can only have it when men say it, especially important men like Tony Blair.

Ah. It turns out he’s not keeping his job as a soldier.

THE DEFENCE FORCES have begun the process of dismissing a soldier who carried out a vicious attack on a woman that he later boasted about online.

Cathal Crotty (22) from Co Clare was today handed a fully-suspended sentence for the assault that he pleaded guilty to. It is understood that he will no longer serve in the Defence Forces once the appropriate processes are complete.

…

[S]enior sources say that the process to remove the convicted man from the Defence Forces has begun and will involve the military’s internal courts martial legal system.

Wise move.

Maybe he can get a job washing Andrew Tate’s cars.

Well whaddya know, UN Women managed to issue a statement about women for a change. No mention of trans women at all.

Today, on the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, and every day, UN Women unequivocally condemns all acts of sexual and gender-based violence wherever, whenever, and against whomever they are perpetrated. On this day, UN Women particularly recognizes the resilience of women and girls who continue to find solutions, build networks of support, and raise their voices amidst threats and limited resources.

Before you say “But they said ‘gender-based'” – yes but they said it along with ‘sexual’. I take the point to be that sexual violence is rape and the like, while gender-based violence against women is beating and shooting and throwing out of windows and all the rest of the physical violence men perpetrate on women. I don’t think it’s a nod to men who pretend to be women.

Sexual violence in conflict, as a devastating form of attack and repression, continues to be used as a tactic of war that impacts women and girls distinctively. Its devastating consequences reverberate across generations, tearing apart the social fabric of communities and hindering nations from achieving lasting peace.

At UN Women, we are working every day to eliminate this atrocity. We work with survivors, women human rights defenders, women’s civil society organizations, and governments to address sexual violence in conflict with urgency, to dismantle structural gender inequality and discrimination, and to prevent sexual violence from happening in the first place. We advocate for survivor-centred services and justice.

Our mission is clear: we strive every day for a world where no woman or girl is subjected to any form of violence, anywhere.

The end. The adults got control of the statement machine for today. I hope they can hang on to it from now on.

The Washington Post put some cameras near storm drains and overlooking the main street in a North Carolina beach town. Upshot: the water is rising.

The videos illustrate how, even on days without major storms, rising waters are compromising stormwater infrastructure, overtopping shorelines, elevating groundwater, and combining with rain to make flooding more persistent and more insidious over time.

The images add to growing evidence captured by scientists who, day after day, are documenting the frequency of these sunny-day floods in an area where sea levels have risen 7 inches since 2010 — among the highest in the country, according to a Post analysis.

The place is doomed.

I recommend watching the videos; they make the problem very vivid.

This one just leaves me blankly unable to understand. The Irish Times:

A serving Irish soldier who beat a woman unconscious in a random street attack, and boasted about it afterwards on social media, has been given a suspended sentence.

You see what I mean. Wtf? Why? Why in hell? Why have any laws at all then?

Cathal Crotty (22), of Parkroe Heights, Ardnacrusha, Co Clare, had initially tried to blame his victim Natasha O’Brien (24), by wrongly telling gardaí who arrested him that she had instigated the attack at O’Connell Street, Limerick on May 29th, 2022.

However, after gardaí showed Crotty CCTV footage of him setting upon Ms O’Brien without provocation, he admitted his guilt, Limerick Circuit Criminal Court heard.

Well he’s clearly a great guy so that must be ARE YOU KIDDING

Hours after the attack Crotty boasted to friends on Snapchat: “Two to put her down, two to put her out,” in reference to striking Ms O’Brien four times.

Ms O’Brien, who was not known to Crotty, was walking home with a woman friend after working a shift at a pub, when Crotty grabbed her by her hair and punched her to the ground.

He continued holding her hair with one hand and punching her face with his other first as she lost consciousness, the court heard.

Ms O’Brien, who sustained a broken nose and bruising, and suffered nightmares and panic attacks afterwards said she thought Crotty was going to kill her.

Crotty fled when a male passerby intervened, however his friends remained at the scene.

What a lovely lovely lovely man; of course he should not be punished.

From her victim impact statement:

“The physical injuries I sustained were devastating; a severe concussion, a broken nose, severe swelling, and bruising on both arms, shoulders, head, right upper thigh, left eye, cheek and jaw.

“I spent the following weeks and months attending hospital and doctor appointments, and due to persistent concussion symptoms I was deemed ‘high–risk’ for a brain bleed, and I received a battery of tests including a head CAT scan.

“A sense of constant dread and isolation was unlike anything I have ever experienced and I spiralled into self-destructive behaviours and lost all interest and motivation for life.

“Basic tasks at work became incredibly difficult and I ultimately lost my job due to my rapidly declining performance. I became numb and detached from reality, living in perpetual fear of seeing him again,” she added.

Oh. He ruined her body and her mind and her life. Well no wonder the judge thinks he should get a pat on the back for it.

There’s no last minute plot twist here. It’s incomprehensible.

Man cannot grasp that women exist and have rights.

Unfortunately he’ll probably be an MP.

Note that he turns the question “What is your message to women asking for single sex services, sport, and care?” into “asking about trans people’s right to exist.” No it fucking isn’t. Telling men to get out of the women’s toilet or the women’s football is not telling them not to exist, it’s telling them not to invade, not to shove their way in, not to intrude, not to grab and take and steal and usurp. They can stop taking our stuff and still go right on existing!

It’s such a bullying move. “We want to keep our spaces and sports.” “Murderers! Slaughterers!! Genociders!!!” The guy isn’t 10 years old, either, he’s a grown man with an academic job.

The death toll rises:

Riyadh — The death toll from this year’s hajj has exceeded 1,000, an AFP tally said on Thursday, more than half of them unregistered worshippers who performed the pilgrimage in extreme heat in Saudi Arabia. The new deaths reported Thursday included 58 from Egypt, according to an Arab diplomat who provided a breakdown showing that of 658 total dead from that country, 630 were unregistered.

All told around 10 countries have reported 1,081 deaths during the annual pilgrimage, one of the five pillars of Islam which all Muslims with the means must complete at least once. The figures have come via official statements or from diplomats working on their countries’ responses.

We’re told Allah is merciful. If that’s true why doesn’t he (and he is a he) update the five pillars? Why doesn’t he tell his slaves to stay home if Mecca is too hot?

The national meteorological center reported a high of 51.8 degrees Celsius (125 degrees Fahrenheit) earlier this week at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Egyptian officials reached by CBS News would not confirm the figures stated by the AFP, but dozens of videos posted on social media in recent days showed bodies lying on the streets around the Grand Mosque.

Wait, it gets worse.

Every year, tens of thousands of pilgrims attempt to perform the hajj through irregular channels as they cannot afford the often costly official permits. Saudi authorities reported clearing hundreds of thousands of unregistered pilgrims from Mecca earlier this month, but it appears many still participated in the main rites which began last Friday. This group was more vulnerable to the heat because, without official permits, they could not access air-conditioned spaces provided by Saudi authorities for the 1.8 million authorized pilgrims to cool down after hours of walking and praying outside.

Isn’t that lovely? Saudi Arabia parlays its ownership of Mecca into a cash machine, but the haj is one of the 5 pillars so people are determined to go so they skip the permits so cash-greedy Saudi Arabia lets them be cooked in the streets. No $$$ no air conditioned spaces for you.

Entitlement much?

Kim Tatum dreams of playing Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard’s exquisite former star of silent films. Mariah Louca longs to perform as Dangerous Liaisons’ evil schemer Marquise de Merteuil. And for Reece Lyons, it’s the monstrous ambition of Lady Macbeth that makes her the ideal role. But, until attitudes within British theatre shift, it’s unlikely these talented performers will get to play their dream characters. Despite their skill, training and accolades, trans women just don’t seem to get cast in cisgender roles.

Yeah what’s up with that? Why do people who put on plays want women for women’s parts when they could have men instead? What are they thinking??

“I have never seen a trans woman on stage play a mother or a love interest,” Offie-award-winning Lyons says. “Why don’t we come to mind for that?”

I have a guess. It may sound crazy but I think it could be because they’re men.

Frustrated with the constant obstacles they face in the industry, the three actors are calling for trans women to be put on an equal footing for cis roles.

That is, the three male actors are calling for male actors to be “put on an equal footing” with women for women’s roles.

Most acting jobs already go to men, of course, because most plays are mostly about men just as most movies are mostly about men. Now men want to take the few women’s parts there are, thus confirming how manly they are, lipstick or no lipstick.

Consequently, trans performers struggle to find consistent work. “You can’t have a sustainable career within theatre if you’re only going to play trans roles,” Lyons says. There just aren’t enough parts. The failure to audition trans women for cis roles is a refusal to truly see them as women.

Because they aren’t women. Also, the fact that a guy can’t have a sustainable career within theatre is not a reason to hire him to play a woman. Most people can’t have a sustainable career within theatre. Vanishingly few women can have a sustainable career within theatre. Acting is a notoriously precarious profession, and most people can’t make a living doing it.

Auditions for cis parts are far more rare, Louca finds, and the majority of trans roles she’s been seen for have put trans agony at the forefront. None of the three are against playing trans roles, so long as that’s not all they’re considered for. Lyons talks with pride about performing in Travis Alabanza’s one-woman show, Overflow, in 2020 as Rosie, a trans woman who talks to the audience from a club bathroom. But being seen almost exclusively for trans roles reduces them. “Trauma is often all we’re given to perform,” Louca says. “Why would I want to relive that?”

For people who work in theater, or claim to, they seem remarkably obtuse about how things work. Casting isn’t done on the basis of who needs the job the most. It’s not done on the basis of who wants the job the most.

To help bring about more opportunities and greater equality for trans women, Louca believes there should be quotas in place. “If there’s 20 people auditioning, audition two or three trans people,” she suggests. Demonstrably increasing the numbers of trans performers considered for non-trans roles would enable more performers to build sustainable careers, develop more talent for our stages, and help influence attitudes among audiences. “Casting directors, producers and directors are deciding our narrative,” says Tatum. “But when you give trans women more visibility on stage and screen, it helps society understand us more.”

Again. That’s not how it works. The goal of theater is not to help society understand narcissists better.

Contempt for women never goes out of style.

An independent candidate standing in Birmingham said “70% of hell will be women” and joked about domestic violence on a podcast earlier this year, it has emerged, as polling suggests he is closing the gap with Labour.

Akhmed Yakoob, who came third in the West Midlands mayoral election in May with just over 10% of the vote, is standing against Labour’s Shabana Mahmood in Ladywood, one of the most deprived constituencies in the country.

Shabana Mahmood is a woman.

In March, Yakoob appeared on an episode of the Minted Minds podcast, hosted by the Birmingham-based entrepreneur Abdhul Zaman. Other guests on the episode included Shakeel Afsar, who is running as an independent candidate in Hall Green and was one of the lead protesters in the row over LGBTQ+ equality teaching in Birmingham schools in 2019; Dr Asif Munaf, a former Apprentice contestant recently suspended by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service pending an investigation by the General Medical Council into allegedly antisemitic social media posts; and the Coventry-based restaurant owners Mohammed “Sunny” Sarnwal and Waqas “Vic” Mohammed.

All dudes.

The podcast episode was advertised as an “emergency meeting” of “influential voices” to talk about Palestine, but over the course of the two-hour conversation the subject turned to masculinity and women.

Munaf said the majority of followers of Dajjaal – a false messiah or liar in Islam – would be women who had been “empowered”, and Yakoob agreed, saying that “70% of hell is going to be women”. One of the guests can be heard saying: “We don’t want to get cancelled.” Later, during a discussion about women making money by dancing on TikTok, Mohammed said: “Getting back to masculinity, I personally would give her a backhander. I’m not joking.”

Shakeel responded: “We do not advocate any physical violence against anyone.” Sarnwal said: “He’s right, though, what he’s saying.”

Yes yes yes but is he a friend to the LGBTTTTTT communniny?

This is both idiotic and evil.

Louisiana will require the 10 Commandments [be] displayed in every public school classroom

The 10 orders are extremely thin morality and they are mostly religious. There is no good reason at all to stick them up in classrooms, let alone to mandate sticking them up in classrooms.

The Sacred Grocery List:

1. I’m the only god
2. Don’t make “idols”
3. Don’t use my name when you swear
4. Make one day every week all about me
5. Honor your father and mother [in that order, of course]
6. Don’t murder
7. Don’t fuck around
8. Don’t steal
9. Don’t lie
10. Don’t long for other people’s stuff

Why put that on the classroom walls? It’s so thin, so impoverished, so minimal – so worthless. The first 4 are god’s vanity project and can be thrown right out, and the last six are either minimal – don’t kill or steal or lie; well no shit, Dad – or nobody else’s business.

There’s nothing about being generous or compassionate or energetic in opposing cruelty and injustice. There are just bossy demands from Mr Deity and a few rules too obvious to mention, let alone plaster on school walls.

Ahem.

Ahem. Cough.

Damn I wish I’d thought to say this. It’s so exactly right.

What, again??

Met Police hassle Maya Forstater

A leading women’s rights campaigner who tweeted that a transgender GP ‘enjoys intimately examining female patients’ has revealed how police threatened to arrest her before launching a 10-month investigation.

Maya Forstater, 51, the head of the charity Sex Matters, has revealed Scotland Yard has been investigating her for the crime of malicious communications since August 2023.

The alleged crime, which carries a punishment of up to two years in prison, relates to a post Ms Forstater wrote on X/Twitter about trans former GP, Dr Kamilla Kamaruddin.

Who is, of course, a man who pretends to be a woman.

Dr Kamaruddin said that after transitioning, patients allowed her to perform ‘more intimate examinations that they did not let me to do when I was a male GP’.

In other words he bragged that he was successfully tricking women into letting him grope their genitals.

The cops threatened Maya with arrest if she didn’t turn up to chat with them.

‘And obviously I didn’t want to be arrested so I went. So I had to get a solicitor and went into the police station to be questioned, and it was only then that they told me what the tweet that was supposed to be a crime was.

‘I sort of thought that this must be mistake. It was like half a tweet. It didn’t tag anybody. It was attached to a blog post that explained why I’d said it.

‘It was not a threat to anybody, it was not obscene, it was based on facts and [the] quite disturbing fact that a doctor who is male was boasting about examining women who wanted a female doctor, and who were told they were getting a female doctor.’

Yes that’s quite disturbing all right. It’s bragging about tricking women into being sexually assaulted in the doctor’s office. How interesting that the Met Police want to arrest Maya for saying so rather than the doctor for doing it and bragging about it.

Ms Forstater, who has not ruled out legal action against the force, said that she was told she was being questioned for ‘targeting a member of the trans community’. 

Oh grow up coppers. What about this horrific doctor who is targeting members of the women community by sexually molesting them? Why don’t you threaten to arrest him instead of Maya?

Ms Forstater told how her solicitor told the police it was ‘ridiculous’, adding how he said: ‘This doesn’t come anywhere near what malicious communication requires for a prosecution. 

‘You should stop the interview right now, or not go ahead with the interview at all. This is discrimination. This is an abuse of my human rights, my freedom of speech to drag someone into police station to question them about a tweet.

‘But the police said ‘no, we’re going to carry on with it’, which they did. And since then, my solicitor has emailed them every couple of months to say what’s happening and they keep saying, we’re still investigating.’

Investigating what? How awful women are for objecting to male doctors who pretend to be women in order to manually rape their female patients? That takes 10 months and counting does it?

A sciency article by 13 yes 13 authors arguing for “gender inclusive language” in [checks notes] childbirth.

The abstract:

Effective communication in relation to pregnancy and birth is crucial to quality care. A recent focus in reproductive healthcare on “sexed language” reflects an ideology of unchangeable sex binary and fear of erasure, from both cisgender women and the profession of midwifery. In this paper, we highlight how privileging sexed language causes harm to all who birth—including pregnant trans, gender diverse, and non-binary people—and is, therefore, unethical and incompatible with the principles of midwifery. We show how this argument, which conflates midwifery with essentialist thinking, is unstable, and perpetuates and misappropriates midwifery’s marginalized status. We also explore how sex and gender essentialism can be understood as colonialist, heteropatriarchal, and universalist, and therefore, reinforcing of these harmful principles. Midwifery has both the opportunity and duty to uphold reproductive justice. Midwifery can be a leader in the decolonization of childbirth and in defending the rights of all childbearing people, the majority of whom are cisgender women. As the systemwide use of inclusive language is central to this commitment, we offer guidance in relation to how inclusive language in perinatal and midwifery services may be realized.

I can’t help thinking it’s a parody. In particular, I can’t believe they wrote “We also explore how sex and gender essentialism can be understood as colonialist, heteropatriarchal, and universalist” with a straight face. Doesn’t that read like parody? Anything “can be understood as” anything, because people are good at coming up with stupid ideas and getting other people to endorse them.

Or take the first sentence:

The notion of childbearing having a necessary or logical belonging within the nuclear two-parent family initiated by heterosexual couples whose gender has a normative relationship with their sex assigned at birth is a recent development in our human history, and one still inconsistently observed around the globe.

Wait wait wait, slow down, you’re jumbling too many things together there. You’re mashing the social into the physical as if they were the same thing, which seems pretty amateurish for an academic article. This is supposed to be an academic article isn’t it?

The heterosexual couple bit is, of course, the reality of How To Make a New Human. The nuclear two-parent family bit is social. A heterosexual pair can make a new human even if the male half of the pair then departs for the other side of the planet, never to be seen again. Sperm meeting egg is one thing and family is another.

13 authors and they couldn’t even get the first sentence right.

No.

Two people have been arrested after Just Stop Oil activists sprayed orange powder paint over Stonehenge.

No no no. Not helping.

Members of the public attempted to stop the spraying and a visitor managed to wrestle a spray can from one of the protesters.

Wiltshire police said: “We have arrested two people following an incident at Stonehenge this afternoon. At around noon, we responded to a report that orange paint had been sprayed on some of the stones by two suspects. Officers attended the scene and arrested two people on suspicion of damaging the ancient monument. Our inquiries are ongoing.”

The evidence is pretty strong, on account of how there’s video of them doing it.