The BBC did a story on the Ukraine famine last week.

Resentment of Moscow in Ukraine has deep historical roots. In the Great Famine of the 1930s, as many as four million Ukrainians died during the forced collectivisation of farms by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The BBC’s Fergal Keane has been to the eastern city of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, and met some of the last survivors of the famine.

…Petro Mohalat, now aged 95, remembers the first food raids in the winter of 1932.

He was five years old when the communist “brigade” arrived in the village. His grandmother told the children to hide anywhere they could.

“It was very scary. The brigade had pitchforks and they

… Read the rest

The Atlantic October 2017: Anne Applebaum on the famine Stalin created in Ukraine:

In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. It was then exacerbated, in the autumn of 1932, when the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful

… Read the rest

Misogyny spotted in the wild.

‘Speak out. You may not change anything by speaking out but if you do not speak out then they have changed you.’ Together. Only together v

— Michael Cashman (@mcashmanCBE) February 20, 2022

You speak for nothing except prejudice.

— Michael Cashman (@mcashmanCBE) February 20, 2022

Speak out, the man says, so a woman speaks out, and he swats her away as if she were a mosquito. I do not like this Michael Cashman.… Read the rest

Internecine war continues.

https://twitter.com/Jebadoo2/status/1495878804719513606

Is he?

Yes.

This is why @EHRCChair should resign. The @EHRC under her chairing has accepted that trans rights conflict with the rights of women. Wrong. Law breakers conflict with equality before the law and obligations to the law. Regardless of stays. Obligations to same rules same laws. https://t.co/2dhpDea7G9

— Michael Cashman (@mcashmanCBE) February 20, 2022

Not wrong. Claimed rights of trans people – that aren’t actually rights, but the ideology insists that they are – to be “validated” as the other sex and to take over the other sex’s spaces and prizes and sports and jobs do indeed conflict with the rights of women. Lia Thomas is one current illustration of how that works. Cashman … Read the rest

Hadley Freeman on why she stopped being a good girl, i.e. a people-pleaser. The shift began in 2014.

I was reading the New Yorker one evening and came across an article with the headline “What is a Woman?”. It was, according to the standfirst, about “the dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism”, a subject about which I knew nothing. I read it, vaguely interested in the social shift that meant being “transgender” no longer refers to someone who has undergone a sex change operation, but is now “how someone sees themselves”, as the writer Michelle Goldberg put it. This meant, Goldberg continued, that women-only spaces were increasingly changing to women-and-transwomen spaces, even if those transwomen still had

… Read the rest

Putin’s going to do a tv talk soon.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to give a televised address soon and he’s expected to speak on whether to recognise the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”.

Russia-backed rebels in those areas – located in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region – have been fighting the Ukrainian military since 2014 but Moscow has not officially recognised their self-declared republics.

Step one. Step two is sending in Russian soldiers to defend the new “republics.”… Read the rest

Sure enough, he backed out.

I'm posting this on behalf of my friend Grace Lavery. Alt text is abridged, sorry.

Please don't @ me. I'm a messenger, I am starting cancer treatment this week, my little brother is in jail, & my car is making a gentle rattling sound of unknown provenance. I'm booked & busy. pic.twitter.com/2E0Oj0ZF00

— jacqui shine (@DearSplenda) February 21, 2022

… Read the rest

Graham Linehan on Jon Ronson on Michfest:

His documentary about Michfest is, of course, a disgrace: the denigration of second-wave feminists is so facile that it actually includes a reference to them “not shaving their legs”; his barely-disguised cheerleading of third-wave feminism—what a coincidence, the porn-positive feminism that most benefits Jon—is grimly revealing. Jon’s compassion is infinite… if you’re male. If you’re female, your rights are subject to the whims of fashion.

Not shaving their legs? Really? Does Jon Ronson shave his?

And of course, there is the unmistakable attempt, one with which feminists are wearily familiar, to place trans-identified males inside the same moral framework as black people experiencing racism. This relentless propaganda, combined with the ambient soundtrack

… Read the rest

Not a good sign.

Russian state TV's chief war correspondent is now in Donetsk

His live reports are full of claims of an 'imminent Ukrainian invasion', attacks on civilian infrastructure & artillery fire from the Ukr side

Says 70,000 women & children evacuated-> RF

The info war is in full swing pic.twitter.com/Fx8ZlH9zUB

— Sarah Rainsford (@sarahrainsford) February 21, 2022

BBC Live says all signs are that Russia is invading Ukraine.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace says “All the indicators point to increasing numbers and readiness of Russian forces.”

He says the pledge to withdraw Russian troops from Belarus at the end of their joint military drills “was not carried out”.

“The exercise has now been extended until further notice,” he says.

… Read the rest

And the rest of it.… Read the rest

This is excellent. GB News was looking for volunteers on Twitter earlier because someone else had to back out, and Dennis raised his hand and so did Jon Pike.

Full clip here of me on GB news tonight guys https://t.co/p278CSaxJG

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) February 20, 2022

… Read the rest

Help friends harm enemies: Republican ethics in a nutshell.

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is backing a controversial proposal to strip $200m in education funding from Democratic counties that defied his executive order last year banning mask mandates in schools.

The Democratic counties did what they thought would help protect students and teachers from a dangerous virus, while the Republican ones took the “don’t tell us what to do” route, which is not always clever in matters of public health. In other words the Dem counties didn’t do anything actually wrong or malicious. It seems very piggy to punish the schools in those counties for that kind of best judgement decision.… Read the rest

Promoting women is sex discrimination, giving scholarships to minorities is majority discrimination, free school lunches are wealth discrimination, yaddayaddayadda.

The Republican senator Ted Cruz complained on Sunday that Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the supreme court was an instance of racial discrimination…

No it’s a correction of generations of racial and sex discrimination. I’m sure he understands that point, it’s not very complicated, but one must throw red meat to The Base.

“Democrats today believe in racial discrimination,” Cruz told Fox News Sunday. “They’re they’re committed to it as a political proposition. I think it is wrong to stand up and say, ‘We’re going to discriminate.’”

But it’s perfectly all right to discriminate in favor … Read the rest

Brendan O’Neill, in one of his getting something right moments, points out the flaw in Laurie Penny’s “feminism”:

Penny writes an awful lot about women for someone who doesn’t know what a woman is. Ostensibly this is a feminist tract, about how humanity faces a terrifying choice – it either carries on down the road to fascism or it embraces the corrective of Laurie Penny’s feminism. (Talk about a rock and a hard place!) And yet it’s a strange feminist tome that thinks men can be women, too. Penny gets it out of the way early. ‘In this book, when I talk about “men” and “women”… I am including everyone who locates themselves in those categories’, she says on

… Read the rest

https://twitter.com/moleatthedoor/status/1495436103725289474… Read the rest

Andy Lewis pointed out this article (to Aaron Rabinowitz specifically) by a detransitioned young woman, and it’s got some strikingly explanatory observations. For her it all started with Tumblr.

A major aspect of Tumblr culture has always been social justice ideology. Things that are now being played out and witnessed by the general public on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, like dissociative identity disorder LARPers, demisexuals, neopronouns, otherkin, and everything you see on @LibsOfTikTok, have long existed in an uncannily identical form on tumblr.com. The oppression hierarchy of racial and gender identities now being written into law in many of our once serious nations was the state religion of the People’s Republic of Tumblr long before your political junkie

… Read the rest

Back in November “Grace” Lavery was pining for a debate.

https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1457157956156411909

Helen Joyce took him up on it.

That’s correct, I have Twitter set to show me notifications and mentions only from mutuals. I’m happy to do an event with @graceelavery – as I already said. @andrewdoyle_com has already offered to moderate this. I’ll drop him a note now saying grace seems now to be on board.

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) November 7, 2021

https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1457323488394588160

Let’s do this thing!

Or…

https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1495207533526466562

Everybody is laughing at him.

Just laughing to myself at the memory of a relative who is now a teenager, when he was a Terrible Two, demanding to be taken for a walk NOW. And when I said: ok,

… Read the rest

Another thing about this – or maybe it’s the same thing but just louder –

There was a video ad in the DC subway today. I am going to post some stills from this ad, and you will try to guess what company is advertising. Fourth photo is the reveal.

#1 pic.twitter.com/b4rhcM6ik9

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) February 17, 2022

The other thing. There is no Harry Potter without its creator. Why? Because she’s the one who created it. That thing they love so much? (I don’t love it, myself, so I can take a detached view of the fandom and the ardor.) That thing they love so much is the work of the woman they think they hate so … Read the rest

Shahrar Ali is suing the Green Party.

A Green Party spokesman is bringing legal action against his former colleagues after he was sacked because of his views on the transgender debate.

Shahrar Ali, 53, was removed as the spokesman for policing and domestic safety on February 5 after activists complained that his tweets about women’s sex-based rights were transphobic.

It’s a neat trick to label non-belief in your magical mystery woo “phobic.” I don’t believe extraterrestrials drop in on us now and then for a chat; that’s not “phobic.” I just don’t believe it.

Party officials ruled that “his decision to champion a highly controversial position in the trans rights debate is not compatible” with his role.

But it’s … Read the rest

No, really????

Trans inmates revert to males when they leave Scottish prisons

I’m stunned. It never ever occurred to me for a second that they would do that. I thought they were totally sincere.

A study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, also revealed that some of these prisoners may only have identified as women in order to have sex with female inmates.

Staggered again!

No I’m not. This is what women have been saying all along.

The SPS said it has no plans to make use of the new research.

Sure. It’s only women who are affected, so who cares.… Read the rest