All entries by this author
Feb 29th, 2024 10:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Telegraph:
Transgender women who are convicted of a crime must be recorded as men if they have not legally changed their gender, Downing Street has said.
The intervention comes after The Telegraph revealed that Scarlet Blake, 26, a male-born transgender woman who was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a stranger and killing a cat, has been recorded as a female criminal in official statistics.
And that’s not ok even if he has “legally changed his gender” – which is frankly a meaningless phrase. If “gender” is just the social bit then why tf would it justify falsifying the statistics? If it’s sex we’re back where we started: no he is not.
The Prime Minister’s spokesman
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2 comments
Feb 29th, 2024 10:43 am |
By Ophelia Benson
This is how we get inched into it.
That’s not good news at all. Who cares if they have “legally changed their gender” or not? It doesn’t matter. Men’s crimes should not be reported as women’s crimes.
Laws aren’t magic. It’s futile to pass a law saying dung is ice cream; you still don’t want to eat it. You could pass a law saying Mars is an easy 5 hour trip by plane, but it wouldn’t be true. Laws can change some … Read the rest
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Feb 29th, 2024 10:05 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Joan Smith writes:
A couple of months ago, it was revealed that 1,151 police officers in England and Wales are under investigation for sexual or domestic abuse, including 657 of Couzens’s former Met colleagues. One in seven of the overall total has been allowed to continue working as usual while 428 have been placed on restricted duties. Only 378 have been suspended. Allegations against officers are so widespread that the Met Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, admitted last year that he couldn’t guarantee that a woman reporting a rape wouldn’t be interviewed by a predator. Is anyone surprised that so many rape investigations go nowhere?
It has been clear for a long time that there are failures at every
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6 comments
Feb 29th, 2024 9:56 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Beeb:
Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens should never have been a police officer and opportunities were missed to stop him, an inquiry has said. A radical overhaul of police vetting and recruitment is needed now, the independent review found.
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Police “repeatedly failed” to spot warning signs about his unsuitability to be an officer, the inquiry said, and it identified at least five incidents which were not reported to police. The inquiry said this included evidence Couzens allegedly committed a very serious sexual assault against a child, described as barely in her teens, before his policing career began.
Yebbut boys will be boys. It’s just nature. You can’t correct nature. You want the cops to be tough and … Read the rest
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Feb 28th, 2024 11:49 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Many doctors share our concerns.
Doctor groups like the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) and the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS) came out swinging.
Doctor’s groups aren’t the same thing as patients’ groups, though. And doctors’ groups aren’t even the same thing as groups of doctors. Doctors’ groups are special interest bureaucracies, and the policies they advocate are not always in line with the interests of the patients at the receiving end of their respective fields of medicine, and they’re often not even in line with the majority of doctors working in the fields they purport to represent. Doctors’ interests diverge from patients’ interests all the time. That’s why medical scandals keep happening. And … Read the rest
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2 comments
Feb 28th, 2024 11:17 am |
By Ophelia Benson
James Esses tells us that incloooosion stretches even to the pet industry.
There’s a handbook.
This Handbook sets out to members of staff the policies and terms & conditions they must adhere to at work. Pets at Home describe this as “our expectations of you as one of our colleagues”.
At the beginning, this reads like any other corporate virtue-signalling manifesto (which, unfortunately, are ten a penny these days). Pets at Home state: “Diversity and inclusion is an important part of who we are and what we do…We aim to create an inclusive experience for our colleagues where everyone can connect to our purpose, be themselves and make their best contributor to our business”.
Everyone can be themselves? What if … Read the rest
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3 comments
Feb 28th, 2024 10:26 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Should we just give up and hand it all over to the bots?
Gemini is essentially Google’s version of the viral chatbot ChatGPT. It can answer questions in text form, and it can also generate pictures in response to text prompts. Initially, a viral post showed this recently launched AI image generator create an image of the US Founding Fathers which inaccurately included a black man. Gemini also generated German soldiers from World War Two, incorrectly featuring a black man and Asian woman.
Yebbut diversidee.
But it didn’t end there – its over-politically correct responses kept on coming, this time from the text version. Gemini replied that there was “no right or wrong answer” to a question about whether Elon
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2 comments
Feb 28th, 2024 9:03 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Two doctors write in The National Post [Canada]:
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s recently announced policies on restricting transgender medical interventions for minors have generated much outrage, notwithstanding a subsequent Leger poll that suggested more Canadians than not agree with her proscriptions.
Doctor groups like the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) and the Canadian Pediatric Society (CPS) came out swinging, each issuing strongly worded statements expressing grave concerns. Dr. Sam Wong, head of the AMA’s pediatrics section, argued that “this is poor legislation that is targeting a small percentage of population that has already been targeted by society … and the government is piling on.”
But maybe, just maybe, it’s not “targeting” people to protect them from damaging physical interventions.
The general
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3 comments
Feb 27th, 2024 6:20 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Guardian explains its “Woman killed man” lie. The explain is: everybody else was doing it.
“It’s not our fault, we relied on an agency report, and we saw no reason to question the claim that a woman had murdered a man by hitting him on the head and strangling him shut up shut up shut UP.”
Breathtakingly feeble and incompetent.… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Feb 27th, 2024 3:26 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
As for the Metro piece itself, by two compliant female reporters, it’s as snide and sneery and dumb as you’d expect.
JK Rowling has sparked backlash over her Sky News criticism for referring to murderer Scarlet Blake as a woman.
Well, she’s “sparked backlash” among the dimwits who are so ready and eager to be sparked that they can’t be bothered to think about what they’re saying.
A clip of the broadcast was shared on the news channel’s X page, and re-posted by Harry Potter author Rowling, who criticised them for not stating that Blake was transgender in the 55-second clip of the show.
The issue is not that he’s “transgender”; the issue is that he is not a woman… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
3 comments
Feb 27th, 2024 12:41 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Bitch opened her mouth did she?
And Metro falls into her trap. Once again, Rowling uses her uncancelleable position to amplify the messages of other women in a way that can’t be ignored, bringing more attention to the issue that these media outlets are quietly, complicitly sweeping under the rug. By commenting now, she keeps the story in the public eye, and brings it to the attention of readers and viewers who had not realized that they had been lied to in the original reportage. While Metro (and other media outlets) think that somehow “Rowling’s transphobia” is the story they’re telling, they’re unwittingly shedding more light on media capture. Interestingly, at … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
3 comments
Feb 27th, 2024 11:43 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Meaning…what?
Does she mean that men who claim to be women do not have male anatomy because it’s their anatomy so it’s not male? Or does she mean they simply magically don’t have male anatomy?
Or both? Or does she not mean anything except “do it to them, don’t do it to me?”
I wouldn’t ask, but this is a former Deputy PM of Canada so…… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
9 comments
Feb 27th, 2024 10:52 am |
By Ophelia Benson
CNN reports:
An active-duty member of the US Air Force who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, on Sunday, has died, authorities said. Aaron Bushnell, 25, said in a video of the incident obtained by CNN that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” and that his suffering was minimal compared to that of Palestinians as the humanitarian crisis persists in Gaza.
He then sets the recording device on the ground before pouring an unknown liquid over himself and igniting it while yelling “Free Palestine” repeatedly. He eventually collapses as police officers rush to douse the flames with fire extinguishers.
Then he died. Then…
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7 comments
Feb 27th, 2024 3:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
How dare a woman say things.
I wanted to show the tweet itself but they seem to have taken it down.
Telling us to shut up only makes us talk more.
Updating to add an incensed reaction or two.
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2 comments
Feb 26th, 2024 5:03 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Ron Filipkowski at Meidas Touch Network reported a few days ago:
Donald Trump’s attorneys were required to submit a proposed order for Judge Engoron to sign that conformed to his verdict and judgment in the case. They complied, but in the process it seems that Trump is trying to pull a fast one somewhere along the way. The proposed judgment that was submitted had the addresses changed for 6 of Trump’s businesses from New York to Florida. It is unclear whether this was something done by Trump before his trial in a feeble attempt to put them out of the jurisdiction of the NY courts, or if it was done after the trial to try to avoid the judgment.
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4 comments
Feb 26th, 2024 11:36 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Good, I was hoping someone would grab the on-air BBC account of the Oxford murder (not available in the US) and someone did. It’s hair-raisingly bad.
Notice the way the anchor all but shouts the word “woman” at the beginning.
At no point in the entire clip does he mention that the murderer is not a woman, is a man, is a “trans woman.” It’s just “woman she … Read the rest
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