Same old same old same old same old.

Keir Starmer has said he is proud of Labour’s history on women’s rights after JK Rowling said she would struggle to support the party because of its stance on transgender rights.

Starmer told reporters on Saturday that he was “very proud of the progress” of past Labour governments, which made a “material difference” to women’s lives.

Yes we know, and that’s not the issue. The issue is not past Labour but current Labour.

Writing in the Times on Saturday, Rowling, a former Labour member and donor, said she would struggle to vote for the party “as long as Labour remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain the[ir] rights”. Asked for his response to Rowling’s comments, the Labour leader said: “I do respect her, but I would point out the long record that Labour has in government of passing really important legislation which has advanced the rights of women and made a material difference.”

Again: we know, but the issue is what Labour does now, and patting yourself on the back for what it did in the past is just changing the subject. If a married man starts punching his wife regularly she’s not going to be mollified by his reminding her of how nice he was to her ten years ago.

On trans rights, he said a Labour government would seek a “reset moment where we can bring the country together and ensure that all debate is done in a respectful way”.

Blah blah blah. That’s just filler. It means nothing.

On Saturday, when asked whether he would now apologise to Duffield, Starmer said: “I think it’s very important, in all political space, that we treat all views with respect and all people with dignity and that’s what I tried to do throughout this. I’m very proud of the progress that we’ve made as a Labour party in government in the past when it comes to women’s rights. I’m conscious that the battle for women’s rights is never over. We need to make further progress in this country.”

In other words no. We know. That’s the problem.

More on Starmer’s exasperated contempt for women:

Starmer has a woman problem, or more specifically, he finds the women who argue for their sex-based rights to be respected, both in law and in practice, extremely irritating. He could barely contain his exasperation during the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday when a young woman asked him about his current views on biological sex, reminding him that he had previously criticised Labour MP Rosie Duffield for stating that “only women have a cervix”. He said at the time her statement of the obvious was something that shouldn’t have been said. “It’s not right.”

It seems he has changed his mind – or has he? Adopting his best human rights lawyer pose, and with only the slightest hint of condescension in his voice, he replied: “Well look, on the biology, I agree with what Tony Blair said the other day in relation to men having penises and women having vaginas.”

I have to stop at that point, again – this time not to snarl but to laugh. Tony Blair said what??? Who ever heard of such a thing? Who knew? This changes everything!!

I mean he didn’t need Tony Blair to say it, did he. It’s not what you’d call an arcane fact. When I quoted him a day or two ago I was so annoyed I didn’t even notice the absurdity. “Tony says men have wee-wees and women have foofies!” Dude everyone says men have penises and women have vaginas. Everyone. You don’t need an authority to say it for you: it’s common knowledge. You really really don’t need MY FRIEND THE FORMER PRIME MINISTER SAYS. You don’t need to name-drop or show off or offer an imprimatur.

It’s far more disgusting than funny, but still, it is also funny.

A little happy ending story.

A pet donkey that escaped his owners five years ago in California has been found “living his best life” with a herd of wild elk. Terrie and Dave Drewry, of Auburn, are convinced the animal, filmed by a hiker earlier in June, is their pet “Diesel”.

…

Diesel was spooked and took off during a hiking trip with Mr Drewry near Clear Lake, California in 2019. Weeks of volunteer searches proved fruitless, and a trail camera image a few months later was the last time he was seen…Then hiker Max Fennell spotted the herd earlier this month, describing the donkey as “happy and healthy”, and posted his film on social media…The elk herd is a few miles away from where Diesel first went missing and in an area where there are no wild donkeys.

So that’s two good reasons to think it really is that particular donkey.

And Max Fennell got a nice letter from PETA.

Bad stupid man complains about woman having concerns he doesn’t approve of.

Bad stupid man accuses women who disagree with his bad stupid tweet of “swarming” his “mentions.” Man said a bad stupid thing and women replied. That’s not “swarming” and man’s “mentions” are not sacred ground that must be kept immaculately clean.

Hmm. Nigel Farage speaks up in defense of manly pastimes like beating up women:

Nigel Farage has praised the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate for being an “important voice” for the “emasculated” and giving boys “perhaps a bit of confidence at school” in online interviews that appear to be aimed at young men over the past year.

The Reform UK leader spoke in favour of Tate for defending “male culture” in a Strike It Big podcast that aired in February, while acknowledging that the influencer had gone “over the top” and elsewhere that he had said some “pretty horrible” things.

Good old male culture, with its mischievous delight in choking and punching and raping women.

Since December 2022, Tate has been facing charges in Romania of human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women, which he denies.

Many politicians and teachers have spoken out against Tate’s influence on young boys in the UK, after the self-proclaimed misogynist said women belonged in the home and were a man’s property. “There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist,” Tate said in one video.

So cheeky! Isn’t he delightful?

In other clips reported by the Observer, the British-American kickboxer – who poses with fast cars and guns, and portrays himself as a cigar-smoking playboy – talks about hitting and choking women, trashing their belongings and stopping them from going out.

…

In his Strike It Big podcast appearance in February, Farage said Tate had been “an important voice” for men, who were being told that male culture should be looked down on.

“Tate was a very important voice for an emasculated … you three guys, you are all 25, you are all kind of being told you can’t be blokes, you can’t do laddish, fun, bloke things … That’s almost what you’re being told. That masculinity is something we should look down upon, something we should frown upon.”

So get out there and beat up some women!

Well you see by “inclusivity drive” we mean inclusion of more boys and no girls.

A leading Scottish school is facing a backlash after its head girl was replaced with a boy in what it claimed was an inclusivity drive.

It is an inclusivity drive – it’s more inclusive of boys.

Williamwood High School in East Renfrewshire has scrapped its positions of head boy and head girl and replaced them with two gender neutral “captains” who are elected by other pupils. Under the system, two of the three male candidates secured the posts while none of the four girls who put themselves forward were chosen.

So it’s inclusive of pupils who don’t want girls as heads or captains or bosses or leaders or whatever label the school comes up with.

The school is facing a backlash from parents and female pupils who claimed that girls are being denied opportunities under the supposedly “progressive” policy. Securing the posts can boost university applications and offer other opportunities such as public speaking.

Yes and that’s why they should all go to boys! Girls are no good at things like university and public speaking.

The school is currently in the process of applying for charter status from the controversial charity LGBT Youth Scotland, which advises against use of words such as boy and girl in classrooms. The organisation advises schools that terms such as “head pupil” are “more inclusive” as alternatives may distress pupils who identify as transgender or non-binary.

Ah. So that’s the real reason. Erasing girls from everything is more “inclusive” of hypothetical gender-magic pupils.

A spokesman for the council said: “Across all our schools, senior pupil leadership teams are in place to represent their peers. The composition of these leadership teams varies, with many schools across Scotland moving away from a head boy and a head girl to appointments of school captains to allow for greater equality.”

But that doesn’t allow for greater equality, you imbecile. Pay attention. It enables less equality, as in zero.

The Telegraph reports on the Times report on Starmer’s hostility to women. (Meta enough yet?)

Writing in an article for The Times, Ms Rowling also attacked Sir Keir for failing to defend Rosie Duffield, the gender-critical Labour MP who was investigated by her own party and has received death threats for her gender-critical views.

“Rosie has received literally no support from Starmer over the threats and abuse, some of which has originated from within the Labour Party itself, and has had a severe, measurable impact on her life,” said Ms Rowling.

And, just in case anyone is coming in late, it’s not just a matter of passive no support, as it were; it’s a matter of evading the question when asked, of changing the subject when asked, of saying “Look” and then something irrelevant when asked.

On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time, the Labour leader was asked whether he agreed with Rosie Duffield, Labour candidate, on the issue of sex and gender. Ms Duffield has long argued that spaces for biological women need to be protected, and that trans women should not be viewed as the same as biological women.

He replied that he now believed the same as Sir Tony Blair, that men had penises and women vaginas. Ms Duffield, the Labour candidate for Canterbury who was previously investigated by the party over her gender-critical views, tweeted sarcastically: “From now on, I shall be submitting my every comment and thought (particularly those mainstream views which most people agree with) to the former Labour prime minister so that it may officially be de-toxified.”

Well he’s a guy so…

On Question Time, Sir Keir said: “On the biology, I agree with what Tony Blair said in relation to men having penises and women having vaginas.” However, in a seeming criticism of activists who do not believe in trans ideology, he added: “I was worried by the way in which the debate was being conducted: it got very toxic… and we lost sight of people in that.”

Yes why are we so vehement about this? Why don’t we just kick back and relax while men take everything we’ve fought for? While we’re at it why don’t we make a really nice dinner?

JKR has a stemwinder of a piece on Labour’s contempt for women.

She went to a launch party for The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht yesterday evening, and got home just in time to join her husband watching Keir Starmer on TV.

“Three years ago,” the woman in the studio audience said to Keir Starmer, “you criticised your MP Rosie Duffield for saying ‘only women have a cervix’. You recently backtracked on this. What do you believe now, and how do we know that you will stick to your views?” Ah, Cervixgate. I remember it well. It was September 2021 and I was sitting at my kitchen table reading over the chapter I’d finished the day before. The TV was on in the background, my husband was making toast, and I thought I must have misheard what the Labour leader had just said, so I reached for the remote. I rewound the programme and replayed his answer, then rewound and replayed it again.

She didn’t want to believe what she’d heard.

But I hadn’t heard Starmer wrongly. When asked whether he agreed with Rosie Duffield that “only women have a cervix”, he’d responded, “well, it is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.”

If you’d catapulted me forwards in time from 1997, the year Labour last succeeded in ending a long stretch of Tory rule, and told me their male leader would appear live on television, dictating what women were allowed to say about their own reproductive systems, I’d have had no frame of reference by which to understand what would have seemed an utterance of outright lunacy.

Unfortunately, by 2021, Starmer’s answer had to be seen in the context of a Labour Party that not merely saw the rights of women as disposable, but struggled to say what a woman was at all.

And why? Because so much of the left is fathoms deep in outright lunacy.

Some of this is almost funny, but loses its humour when real-world consequences of gender ideology arise. When asked whether violent sex offenders who transition should be rehoused in women’s prisons, Lisa Nandy, the shadow secretary for international development, said: “I think trans women are women, I think trans men are men, so I think they should be in the prison of their choosing.”

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the candidate for Salford, said female victims of male violence shouldn’t use their trauma “as an argument to discriminate against trans people” and vowed to change laws to stop women’s refuges excluding men who identify as women.

Women shouldn’t “use their trauma” to defend their rights against an onslaught from men, but men should definitely use their imaginary oppression by women who know a man when they see one to defend not their rights but their grotesque new privileges.

“On the biology,” Starmer began, “I agree with what Tony Blair said the other day, in relation to men having penises and women having vaginas.”

Pause for universal disbelief. I know we already knew about this, but the asininity of it doesn’t wear off. Oh I see, Tony Blair said the other day that men have penises and women have vaginas. Did he really?!?! How very exciting and groundbreaking and inspirational. Thank you so much Mister Starmer for quoting him saying that because otherwise we would never have thought of such a thing.

And off we meandered into the familiar trans activist talking points where so many Labour frontbenchers appear to feel most comfortable: “… my view in life is to give respect and dignity to everyone, whatever their position. And I was worried at the time, you referenced that particular debate [when Rosie Duffield stated biological facts], by the way in which the debate was being conducted, because it got very toxic, very divided, very hard line …”

Thank you again Mister Starmer for yet again telling us that Rosie Duffield is a mean bitch unlike you and the rest of your friends who all know that men are women if they put on lipstick.

JKR talks about her friendship with Rosie.

She and I share more than the occasional meal and a fairly sweary WhatsApp thread. Last month, a man received a suspended prison sentence for sending both of us death threats. Rosie was to be taken out with a gun; I was to be beaten to death with a hammer. The level of threats Rosie has received is such that she’s had to hire personal security and was recently advised not to conduct in-person hustings.

Is this what Starmer meant, when he talked about toxic, divided debate? A female MP in his own party being intimidated and harassed? Or was he referencing the activists in black masks who turn up at women’s demonstrations with the declared intention of punching “Terfs”, an intention that has more than once translated into action? Was he perhaps thinking of the trans activists who sang “f*** you” over a microphone as women from all over the world queued outside FiLia, the feminist conference, to discuss issues like female genital mutilation? It didn’t seem so.

The impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hard line in Rosie’s words, even though almost identical words had sounded perfectly reasonable when spoken by Blair.

Well there’s a reason for that. It’s because men are nice and women are bitches.

Erase erase erase

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.