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I’m seeing a lot of discussion of Rebecca Watson’s video about Epstein and Lawrence Krauss and Dawkins and the string of women Dawkins has burned through and CFI and That Conference and and and.

It’s worth a watch.… Read the rest

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By Ophelia Benson, February 8, 2026

I’m seeing a lot of discussion of Rebecca Watson’s video about Epstein and Lawrence Krauss and Dawkins and the string of women Dawkins has burned through and CFI and That Conference and and and.

It’s worth a watch.… Read the rest

Archives
Bad Moves
Articles
Flashback
In Focus
Latest News
Letters
Notes and Comment Blog

Take notes 

I’m seeing a lot of discussion of Rebecca Watson’s video about Epstein and Lawrence Krauss and Dawkins and the string of women Dawkins has burned through and CFI and That Conference and and and.

It’s worth a watch.… Read the rest

Quirky 

Wait.

First six seconds of this:

“But as he said, it wasn’t him, he’s got a big group that’s posting”

Stop right there.

WHY?

Why has he got a big group that’s posting on his social media?

Why has he got a big group that’s posting on his social media?

He doesn’t have to post anything on social media. It’s not part of the job. It’s not a requirement. And if he’s going to do social media he sure as hell should not be farming out the job to random … Read the rest

Cash cow going dry 

Hadley Freeman writes

Last week Fox Varian, a 22-year-old woman, was awarded $2 million by a New York court in a medical malpractice lawsuit against doctors who gave her a double mastectomy when she was 16 — not because it was medically necessary but because Varian was then identifying as a boy.

Varian’s mother, Claire Deacon, did not want her then teenage daughter to lose her breasts. She had seen her autistic daughter through a host of other problems, including anxiety and anorexia. Varian had cycled through name changes — Isabella to Gabriel to Rowan and finally to Fox — as if she were trying to find herself. Then she announced she was transgender. Instead of seeing this as yet

… Read the rest
10 times a day 

Oh hell no.

Growing up in India, I learned that thank yous are only for distant strangers, and that close friends and family get offended if you thank them. I would say thank you to a speaker delivering a formal talk but never to a friend helping during a crisis or a family member making me dinner. But living in the UK for two decades has forced me to adopt our incessant “thank you” culture. I now find myself saying thank you at least 10 times a day and sometimes many more. Nevertheless, there are some British “thank yous” that I would ban completely, if I could.

…

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that we

… Read the rest
But but but her eyeliner 

Imane Khelif’s latest propaganda campaign should fool nobody

That’s Oliver Brown in The Telegraph.

Protests against the athlete’s gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics were never about the transgender issue in the first place, but about a disqualification from the previous year’s world championships over sex test results indicating the presence of male chromosomes. Khelif has still not furnished any evidence to the contrary.

Instead, there has been only a cynical PR campaign, soft-soaping the Paris travesty by portraying Khelif – rather than the women smashed in the face by an opponent they could not even be sure was biologically female – as the victim. Worse, credulous news giants are still falling for it. Take this Mills &

… Read the rest
To defy cultural expectations 

CNN continues the campaign of cheating and insulting women.

The 26-year-old champion’s path from her humble roots in Algeria has been defined by determination and the courage to defy cultural expectations, including that a girl should not fight.

Now, Khelif has emerged as an unwitting lightning rod in the culture wars shaping elite sports and likely to influence new International Olympic Committee (IOC) policies on women’s eligibility. Those rules could establish whether to reintroduce mandatory genetic testing – determining not only whether Khelif is eligible to compete in the 2028 Los Angeles Games, but also how athletes whose bodies fall outside narrow expectations of what it means to be a woman are pushed out altogether.

Ah yes “narrow expectations” … Read the rest

Credulity stretching time 

Alex Massie on the determination to put women in danger for the sake of male games.

Voters should know that if they vote for the SNP (or the Green Party), they really are voting for men convicted of some of the most heinous crimes to be housed in the female prison estate simply because these men have decided they are in fact women themselves.

Or, in fact, because these men have decided to pretend they think they are in fact women themselves, in order to be housed in the female prison estate.

Note that there’s no way to tell the difference. Note that the SNP and the Green Party don’t even care that there’s no way to tell. Note the … Read the rest

Back in the spotlight 

Why is the SNP still fighting for a trans killer to be in a female jail?

In November 2013, the Scottish courts dealt with an “utterly depraved” murder. Eight months earlier, Robert Shankland, a “caring and vulnerable” 46-year-old in poor health, had been lured to a property in the town of Glenrothes, Fife.

There he was subjected to grotesque torture over several hours, including a sexual assault. After a ligature was tied around Shankland’s neck and a plastic bag pulled over his head, his three killers ate ham sandwiches alongside the body.

Among them was Paris Green, 22 at the time, who was born Peter Laing.

Another Paris, eh. Funny how they don’t name themselves Pittsburgh or Detroit or Grimethorpe.… Read the rest

He did it all 

If you look at it the right way it’s true.

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke from prepared remarks as he discussed the persecution of Mariam Ibrahim. Ibrahim was unjustly imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014, in a case centered on her Christian faith, until she was released that same year following a global outcry.

Trump correctly said: “Believers all over the planet rallied to Mariam’s cause, prayed for her protection, and successfully pressured for her release.”

But then the president appeared to ad-lib – and claimed that he was the one who got Ibrahim freed.

“I did that. I did that. I did that with one phone call,

… Read the rest
Definition 

Trump doesn’t know what a mistake is.

The president said Friday that he had watched and passed along the video — which focused on claims of voter fraud until the final seconds of the clip — to unidentified “people” to post to his Truth Social account, but that he “didn’t see the whole thing,” including the brief portion that showed the heads of the Obamas edited onto the bodies of apes.

In response to a question from The Washington Post about whether he would heed the calls of some Republicans to apologize for posting the video, which was widely condemned as racist and offensive, Trump said he would not.

“No, I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump said on his

… Read the rest
no idea what they even are 

JCO keeps right on demonstrating that nobody’s home.

So JCO has never had the faintest idea why toilets are designated for women or men? She’s never been assaulted or spied on in a women’s toilet? That would be odd, because it’s a very common experience for women. She thinks there’s no need for prevention, it’s enough to do something unspecified after it happens?

And she calls us “airy, vacuous”…… Read the rest

Pastor Patsy Patsy 

We’re supposed to believe this?

Oh come on. He’s notoriously a shameless liar. His assuring anyone of anything means nothing. Adding “clearly” and “unequivocally” to the verb does nothing to make it true. Trump lies as easily and readily as he sneers and mocks and insults and libels. And as for “He understands the painful and racist history in America of depicting African Americans as apes, a tactic … Read the rest

Naughty tauty 

Hey kids it’s time for Ontology Gymnastics!

Biological sex is an “artificial parameter” for deciding where prisoners should be held, Scottish National Party (SNP) ministers have told a court.

Gerry Moynihan KC, acting for the Scottish Government, argued that there should be flexibility to allow transgender women, who are biological men, to serve their sentences in female jails.

He told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that defining “a man as a man and a woman as a woman, without exceptions” was “artificial”.

I know I’ve already made fun of this, but it’s just so rewarding. Defining an X as an X is not so much artificial as it is a tautology. It’s the very opposite of a definition, because … Read the rest

The “or else” path to glory 

Meanwhile Trump is continuing his unlovely campaign to plaster his filthy name all over everything.

Donald Trump has told the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, that he will unfreeze funds for major infrastructure projects in New York City if he supports renaming Dulles international airport and Penn Station after him.

The demand, which was first reported on Thursday by Punchbowl News, comes after the president in October halted $18bn in funding for a major subway line expansion in New York City as well as a new rail tunnel connecting the city to New Jersey. The funding freeze was announced on the first day of a 43-day government shutdown in which Schumer, who represents New York, played a major

… Read the rest
Show us the job description 

No but it was a staffer, how many times do we have to tell you it was a staffer???

Following an intense backlash this morning, the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost of a video showing a racist clip depicting the Obamas as apes.

Multiple outlets cite a senior White House official as saying:

A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.

The post was up for 12 hours.

So they’re telling us there’s a staffer whose job it is to post torrents of obnoxious drivel and insults and lies in the middle of the night???

Ok, news media: you know what you have to do now. Ask them why. … Read the rest

A staffer did it 

And then there was the spin.

… Read the rest

There should be flexibility 

Knowing that men are not women is just so random, ya know? What’s the point? Relax, enjoy the ride!

Biological sex is an “artificial parameter” for deciding where prisoners should be held, Scottish National Party (SNP) ministers have told a court.

They have? Really? Surely they meant “arbitrary”? Calling it artificial seems deranged even for them.

Gerry Moynihan KC, acting for the Scottish Government, argued that there should be flexibility to allow transgender women, who are biological men, to serve their sentences in female jails.

We need that flexibility so that men can have opportunities to beat up and rape women, right? It’s just common sense.

He told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that defining “a man as

… Read the rest
Screenshot from the sewer 

I tried to find a news outlet for this one but it turns out the swift image-first version does the job much better. The image is the story.

… Read the rest

Scorched earth policy 

I didn’t know this.

Did he literally buy the Post in order to destroy it? Is it that simple? … Read the rest

Quid pro whaddyacallit 

Trump throwing more toys out of the playpen:

The U.S. ambassador to Poland is lashing out at the country’s parliament speaker for the offense of not supporting President Trump’s Nobel Prize aspirations.

Ambassador Tom Rose raged at Parliament Speaker Wlodzimierz Czarzasty in an X rant on Wednesday. In the post, Rose threatened that the US would “have no further dealings, contacts, or communications” with Czarzasty, due to his “insults directed against President Trump.”

What did he say?

Czarzasty made the alleged “outrageous and unprovoked insults” toward Trump on Monday while speaking to journalists.

The 65-year-old chairman of Poland’s New Left party said he would not support U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Israeli Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana’s campaign to

… Read the rest