Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Preemptively

    Trump’s DoJ wants to help him interfere with the elections in order to prevent a Dem majority.

    The Justice Department has moved to preemptively block certification of the results of Alaska’s Senate race if Republican incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan loses his tight race against Democrat Mary Peltola next month.

    It doesn’t get much starker than that.

    In a lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday, department officials described the candidacy of a third contender in the race — another Republican named Dan J. Sullivan Jr. — as a bid to mislead supporters of Sen. Sullivan into voting for the wrong candidate.

    They asked a federal judge to bar the state from certifying the race’s results, should the senator lose by a margin less than the number of votes his same-named challenger receives. In that scenario, the department said, the court should investigate whether that result was tainted by voter confusion.

    The move marked a highly unusual bid by the Justice Department to potentially intervene in the outcome of a race that could determine control of the Senate before the election has occurred. 

    Yeah that’s highly unusual all right. Not in a good way.

  • Let her go

    From the National Secular Society:

    Secularist, interfaith and human rights groups have united to call for Government action to free a Moroccan activist jailed for ‘blasphemy’ over a t-shirt she wore in London.

    The National Secular Society and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) have coordinated an open letter to foreign secretary Ed Miliband MP calling for “urgent and decisive UK intervention” in the case of Ibtissame Betty Lachgar (pictured), who has spent over a year in a Moroccan prison.

    The letter, whose 15 signatories include Index on Censorship, Humanists International and the All Faiths Network, says Lachgar’s imprisonment not only represents a “grave violation of international human rights law”, but also “establishes a dangerous extraterritorial precedent with direct implications for people in the United Kingdom”.

    Blasphemy is perhaps the most basic human right there is. The right and freedom to ignore all the claims about magic giant sky-dwelling men who have authority over us are essential to freedom of thought as well as freedom of speech and headgear.

    Lachgar, a renowned human rights activist, was arrested in August 2025 and sentenced to 30 months’ imprisonment for sharing a photograph of herself in London wearing a t-shirt reading “Allah is Lesbian.” The t-shirt was originally worn to condemn the death sentences of two lesbians in Iran.

    Lachgar was convicted under Article 267-5 of the Moroccan Penal Code, which criminalises “insults” against Islam. The letter warns this effectively extends Morocco’s blasphemy laws “beyond its borders, raising deeply troubling implications”.

    There is no Allah in London and there is no Allah in Morocco either. There is no Allah. Deal with it. The Allah-God-Whatever myth is a human invention, because life on earth is scary.

    Let her go.

  • Deepity of the day

    Oh please.

    There’s a little bit of truth to that, in the sense that we can to some extent decide how to react to the various realities that confront us every day. The “to some extent” bit is very important. We can Stoic our way through a mild injury or illness, but we can’t just ignore a missing leg or head. We can be a grownup about missing out on a particular dinner party or night at the opera, but we can’t flourish while living on the street surrounded by fentanyl addicts. We can seem cheerful for the sake of the children, but we can’t keep it up if the children themselves are slaughtered in front of us.

    And no, we can’t change sex just by thinking we have. We can’t change sex by any other means either; it can’t be done.

    Yes we can have a fantasy that we’re the other sex. Yes we can try to live that fantasy 24/7, but we shouldn’t, because it has consequences beyond our personal contentment. In any case living the fantasy 24/7 is not the same thing as reality. Living any fantasy 24/7 is not reality. Some such fantasies may be harmless I suppose, but not if there are dependents who are harmed, not if there are bystanders who are harmed, not if there are people who don’t want their realities confused with other people’s fantasies.

    Skip the self creation. Create something useful – a table, a house, a wildlife refuge, a prison for Trump and his enablers. We have plenty of selves already; we need ways to get them to grow up.

  • Suggest

    Trump and his gang of thugs keep violating court orders.

    A federal judge raked President Donald Trump’s administration over the coals on Monday in a case involving his plans to renovate a public golf course in Washington, DC. After the administration cut down more than 430 trees without properly notifying US District Judge Ana Reyes, she said last week she was “furious” and issued a court order to stop it.

    …

    District judges like Reyes ruled that the administration had violated court orders in at least 31 lawsuits over 15 months, according to an Associated Press investigation in May. That’s in addition to more than 250 other examples of noncompliance that judges have found related to immigration cases.

    And the judges finding these violations are often Republican-nominated ones.

    Any one of these examples could be understood as a mistake or a mishap. But the growing volume of them — along with Trump and those around him often speaking openly about violating court orders, as Trump did Sunday — suggest there’s something more going on. (A whistleblower last year also claimed that a top DOJ official explicitly spoke about the possible need to ignore court orders.)

    Suggest??? Gosh, ya think? The fact that he keeps violating court orders suggests that he might possibly have a pattern of violating court orders? Let’s not go crazy here.

  • Brace

    Danger.

    National security officials have been secretly bracing for the possibility that Donald Trump refuses to accept the midterm election results.

    As numerous polls have predicted a big blue wave on Nov. 3, a small group of officials has been laying the groundwork alongside state governments and members of Congress to protect democracy, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

    The group includes ten current and former Defense Department officials who identify across the political spectrum, the Post reported, and who are concerned the 80-year-old president will sacrifice the nation’s integrity to keep his party in power.

    The 80-year-old evil ruthless psychotic president will do whatever he feels like doing to keep himself in power.

    With the midterm elections quickly approaching, concerns have grown in recent days of Trump and his allies potentially taking drastic measures to retain Republican control.

    Last month, for example, a former conservative judge warned in a New Republic op-ed that “another Jan. 6” could occur on Jan. 3, 2027—the start of a brand-new House after the midterms.

    He’ll do whatever he can get away with.

  • The historical significance

    We want it, we want it now, we’re not going to wait around for trained curators, we’re going to take it right now, oops we dropped it.

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted to move the world. A replica of it, anyway.

    Two floor globes said to be used by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II are housed in the Pentagon, where subsequent generations of Army leaders became custodians of the artifacts, according to people familiar with their lineage and an accompanying plaque dating them to the 1930s.

    The historical significance was attractive to Hegseth, these people said, and his staff requested that the secretary’s office become the new home to one of the 30-inch globes.

    Which is a tad inappropriate since Hegseth is no Eisenhower.

    Ordinarily, moving historical items within the building is a deliberate process overseen by trained curators. Instead, Hegseth’s staff dispatched its own team to relocate an Eisenhower globe. They lost control of the artifact and dropped it, sending the globe crashing onto its base and impaling the fragile shell near Antarctica, according to those familiar with the incident. The resulting gash appears to be several inches wide.

    …

    The Army, in an email to The Post, acknowledged that the globe was damaged and said it occurred during an “attempted move” Feb. 3. Aside from the hole, “the spherical portion of the globe was detached from the metal mounting that allows it to rotate,” spokesman Christopher Surridge said in response to questions. Ultimately, the damaged relic was not relocated, he said.

    Hegseth and his people can’t even pick up a goddam globe without breaking it. Putin is watching and laughing his ass off.

  • A consensual too far

    Now about this consensual hugging thing…

    The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) has removed a social media advertisement about consent featuring grandparents hugging their grandchildren.

    The video depicted a young girl being uncomfortable receiving a hug from her grandparents…In the advertisement, a voiceover carries the message after the girl expresses discomfort at receiving a hug: “Not everyone wants a hug. Even from the people who love them.”

    True, I suppose, but not really something to be managed by outsiders, surely? Wouldn’t the normal thing be behind the scenes conversations or squabbles between child and parents? “I hate it when Auntie Joan squeezes me!” The parent can say “too bad, deal with it” or “I’ll have a word with her” or something in between, because the parent knows the people involved. You see what I mean? The parent knows more about it than the state does – because the state in fact knows nothing at all about it.

    The Department of Justice said “We-Consent” is a programme created and developed by the DRCC aimed at informing, educating and engaging the public about all forms of consent.

    Which is not relevant to close relatives hugging the children of the broader family. If there has to be a legalistic conversation first then the whole damn point of familial hugging is lost. What is the point of non-parental family hugging the children of said family? To convey affection! Duh! If it becomes like a union meeting that point is lost. The hug has to be a thing that simply bursts out of the non-parental relatives because they love the child.

    On the other hand the child may dislike being hugged or the relatives in question or both, but that’s for the families to work out.

    And in conclusion, how is this something for a rape crisis centre to deal with?

  • and all who celebrate

    Oh my god I didn’t know, I didn’t realize, I don’t have the flags ready, whatever shall I do?

    VE/VER?

  • With hate markers

    Everything is nuts these days. This is even more nuts than most of the things that are nuts these days.

    To clarify. This is an actual criminal record. I have a criminal record. And I was given it without being interviewed, informed, questioned, or charged; the CPS were not involved, and there was no magistrate, judge or jury. The Chief Constable just gave it to me because it is in his gift to do so. Because the Home Secretary says he can.

    I think the former police officer, dismissed for gross misconduct, is the fragrant Alex Horwood aka Lynsay Watson.

  • Given that silence

    Do the LibDems hate women?

    We have met with representatives from the Labour Government, the Conservatives, and Reform.

    We have also repeatedly reached out to the @LibDems, particularly following their troubling treatment of gender-critical women at their recent conference. From @EdwardJDavey, @timfarron, and @HelenMorganMP, we have received only silence.

    Given that silence, we hoped the party’s spokesperson for women and equalities, Marie Goldman MP, would want to hear the experiences of frontline NHS nurses involved in a landmark legal case.

    Again, silence.

    Women who believe that biological sex matters, that truth matters, and that every person deserves dignity and respect are hearing that message loud and clear.

    Not very Lib and not very Dem.

  • Someone is missing

    Absolutely breathtaking. The UK doctors’ union doesn’t give the teeniest tiniest rat’s ass about women and their rights. They’ve issued a Statement to underline this surprising indifference.

    Since the April 2025 Supreme Court judgment on the definition of sex under the Equality Act 2010, the BMA has been deeply concerned about the potential harms that the ruling would have on our trans and non-binary members, colleagues, patients and wider community.

    We have previously written to the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) and NHS England raising these concerns and calling on them to ensure any new or revised guidance must clearly set out how equitable access to healthcare and inclusive spaces for trans and non-binary people in healthcare settings can be achieved.

    Not so much as a whisper about women.

    NHS England has now published two further guidance documents for NHS organisations:

    – Privacy, dignity and safety in hospital accommodation – revised guidance on same-sex accommodation for patients

    – Guidance on NHS staff facilities – new guidance on the provision and use of NHS staff facilities.

    We are deeply concerned that this high-level guidance will result in local policies that are exclusionary to trans and non-binary staff and patients. It will affect their ability to access and work in the NHS and have negative consequences for cisgender people. We are calling for urgent clarity from NHS England on how employers can implement the guidance in a way that is safe and inclusive of trans and non-binary people, who are already one of society’s most marginalised groups and who are becoming ever more fearful of harassment and discrimination when accessing healthcare.

    In other words they’re calling for NHS England to go back to letting men be in women’s wards and all the rest of it. They’re calling for NHS England to go back to giving men everything they demand at the expense of women. Their fear doesn’t even register with the BMA. Why’s that?

    All staff and patients deserve to be treated with equal care and to have access to safe, appropriate and accessible facilities. The BMA supports fair and equitable access for all trans and non-binary healthcare staff and patients to accommodation, services and care according to their gender, while ensuring their privacy, dignity and safety.

    For the billionth time, that is not possible. You can’t give men access to women’s accommodation, services and care without taking it away from women. Obviously. If you put men in it, it’s no longer women’s. Where is your concern for women?

    We understand that this is a deeply upsetting time for many of our trans and non-binary members and patients and would like to reaffirm our support and commitment to them.

    We don’t give the tiniest shit about women though. Fuck them. Bitches.

    It’s breathtaking.

  • Polarising shmolarising

    Is JK Rowling taking the BBC’s calls? It appears not.

    When the BBC announced last week it was making a two-part documentary series about JK Rowling, trans activists reacted with all the finely modulated restraint we’ve come to expect from them. On Bluesky, the social-media equivalent of Hades, comments ranged from ‘Fuck the UK’s anti-trans hag’ to ‘can someone please just nuke us already’.

    …

    In truth, everything we know about the Rowling series so far suggests the corporation has failed to take seriously last year’s leaked internal memo warning that its output is unduly influenced by trans ideologues.

    To put it very very very mildly.

    Take the press release for a start. This describes Rowling as ‘one of Britain’s most polarising public figures’, which implies some kind of equivalence between her mass popularity and the anger felt towards her by a tiny, if vocal, group of hysterical activists. Yet she has many magnitudes more fans than haters.

    Good point. Pole number one is millions of paying fans; pole number two is a few hundred bed-wetters.

    Lest we need reminding, JK Rowling has sold more than 600 million Harry Potter books. Films based on Harry Potter have grossed $7.7 billion. Polarising? Sure, if you imagine the enthusiasm of millions of fans equates to the hurt feelings of a shrill, self-obsessed minority who want the world to revolve around them.

    And not just shrill and self-obsessed but also crazed and delusional. Humans can’t change sex. “Trans activists” are activists in the cause of insisting that humans can indeed change sex, and that they can do it just by saying so.

    Yet the arrogance of the BBC in pontificating about Rowling wasn’t the most remarkable thing about its press release. Notably absent was any reference to her participation. Had she agreed to take part, you can be sure the publicity would have led with that announcement.

    Never mind, I’m sure the BBC still has Jonathan “India” Willoughby’s phone number.

  • Musk ordered

    Seriously?

    Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a version of SpaceX’s Starlink that Ukraine has relied on in its war against Russia, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter.

    Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, last week “capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network,” the Journal reported. The decision left some Ukrainian drones virtually inoperable, according to the newspaper.

    Musk and President Donald Trump, who have both recently criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, discussed the move to throttle Starlink “soon after” the change first became public last week, two people told the Journal.

    One of the people who spoke with the news outlet claimed that Musk discussed the matter with multiple senior Trump administration officials, including the president himself, prior to imposing the Starlink speed cap.

    I’m all out of words.

  • No compassionate person

    Well now wait a second.

    But what are we calling “conversion practices”?

    It’s Bridget Phillipson, so we can assume she’s talking about Our Trans Siblings, but in fact it could apply to all sorts of things.

    It could apply to suicidal people for example. It would be conversion practice to try to convince them that life can be worth living. It could apply to murderous people; conversion practice would be trying to talk them out of murdering anyone.

    Yes, people can get things wrong, of course. There’s no need to talk people out of being lesbian or gay.

    On the other hand there’s a huge area of life that’s all about decisions, and discussing them. They can be trivial or they can shape a person’s life. Sometimes people actually want advice or argument or cautions or questions. Sometimes people are ambivalent about discussing or not discussing. There are a million variables. It’s simplistic to call it “conversion practices” just because it’s about the fad for deciding one is in the wrong body.

    Also, news flash, it’s just not the case that every single person who decides xir is in the wrong body is correct about that rather odd claim.

    Also also, deciding you’re trans is not the same thing as realizing you’re lesbian or gay or bisexual. LGB people don’t have to change anything. People who think they’re in the wrong body mostly want to change that body, or at least disguise it in some drastic ways. Bridget Phillipson apparently wants them all to dash into it without hesitation. Not her mess to clean up, is it.

  • But what about our safety dignity privacy?

    Female Union boss stabs women in the back.

    Of course, placing men on women’s wards does not offer WOMEN safety, dignity, or privacy, but Andrea Egan, a woman, does not care.

    Make it make sense.

  • House of the peeps

    There is precedent.

    It features a huge ballroom with niches for portraits of the dictator and his wife and a sliding roof so that a helicopter can enter and exit. The building also had a nuclear bunker. The aesthetic sense of the two men is much the same but Trump’s construction will probably be even worse.

    Trump is very competitive that way.

  • Justifications

    Oh they’re challenging topics, are they.

    The Spectator can now reveal that Abdul Qader Ismail is an active member of Greens for Palestine and co-sponsored the group’s ‘Zionism is Racism’ policy. He is also the author of a book series titled An Introduction to Challenging Topics for Muslim Teens. The books provide justifications (within specific conditions) for stoning, crucification, cutting off hands and female genital mutilation.

    Gosh, that is challenging.

  • Totalitarian regime, totalitarian ideology

    Kunwar Khuldune Shahid writes:

    Bangladesh’s response to the killing of its citizens over ‘indecency’ has been to profess ignorance and to issue a subdued request for Saudi Arabia to share legal details of the case. Suffice to say, should the kingdom offer the formality of a response, Bangladesh, like most Muslim states, would accept the sharia ruling, which brazenly tramples the sacrosanctity of human life under the intangible ‘sanctity of the mosque’. And in its deafening silence, Bangladesh would be joined by the rest of the Muslim world, where violent protests frequently erupt over sacrilegious cartoons and foreign wars.

    Indeed, Muslim protesters, including in the West, are trigger-happy when it comes to unleashing any rage directed against non-Muslim entities. There is deafening silence, however, when Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE, Syria or others massacre hundreds of thousands, or when jihadist groups such as Isis use Islamic scriptures to carry out some of the worst crimes against humanity.

    It is self-preservation that necessitates the al-Saud family’s enforcement of sharia. Any dissension would pave the way for dissidence against the royal family’s absolutist rule over the kingdom. A totalitarian regime is best sustained by a totalitarian ideology, especially when its adherents around the world are willing to accept, if not endorse, pretty much any act of violence committed in its name.

  • Gee, imagine how they feel

    What’s the problem here?

    I didn’t even watch the whole thing, but I can tell you anyway. Starting at 43 seconds he says “…the British government has just made it compulsory for trans women like myself to be placed in male wards in hospital. [long dramatic pause] And the cruelty of that is [very soft pained voice] extraordinary.”

    Oh yes? That’s cruel is it? But what about the British government making it compulsory for women to be placed in hospital wards with one or more men in them? I ask that because you see if the government says you can be placed in female wards, you’re doing the same damn thing to women that you’re so distraught about when it’s being done to you. How do you manage to overlook that fact? How do you manage to have so much tender and dramatic concern for your plight and none whatsoever for the plight of the women who would be forced to put up with you in their wards?

    Sadly, we all know how. Because you’re a self-centered pig who does not give two shits about women, that’s how.

  • Taking such arrant nonsense seriously

    Much as I dislike agreeing with Conservative Anythings, they’re not wrong on this one.

    (Anyway, as I keep pointing out, with more or less exasperation depending on circumstances, there’s always some overlap – some agreement with the Other Team and/or disagreement with Our Team.)

    It always strikes me as more ridiculous than despicable, because I never can see how adults can persuade themselves to talk such silly gibberish. Why do managers of grown-up institutions like the Civil Service feel it necessary to blather about idennniny and genner expression and all the rest of it?