Carole Cadwalladr has a scathing review of The Revenant (as did all three of the guests on Saturday Review yesterday). It sounds absolutely rebarbative.

It’s a tale of “revenge, retribution and primal violence”, according to theGuardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin”. This is praise, by the way. It’s “unthinkingly, aggressively masculine,” saysGQ. That’s praise too.

The film is based on a true story of the American frontier from 1823 and I’ll summarise the plot for you: man seeks revenge, man gets revenge. That’s it, basically, for two and a half hours, though there is a brief reprieve when you get to

The armed but white thieves trespassing at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are begging to be arrested and evicted, and law enforcement is still standing around daydreaming.

The militiamen occupying a wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon have adopted increasingly bold and risky tactics in their protest against the federal government, raising questions about how long law enforcement officials can allow the standoff to continue.

Why do law enforcement officials want to allow the standoff to continue? Why are they asking how long they can keep doing that, instead of not doing that? If those people were not white, we know damn well they wouldn’t be sipping their 10th cup of coffee instead of arresting the thieving gun-having criminals.

Now entering

Oyyy, it’s not just Germany. It’s Sweden too.

Sweden’s prime minister has condemned a “double betrayal” of women after allegations that police covered up sexual harassment by recent immigrants at a music festival in Stockholm. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of attacks on women in Malmö on New Year’s Eve.

Groups of refugees molested concertgoers at We Are Stockholm, Europe’s largest youth festival, in the summer of 2014, according to internal police memos obtained by Dagens Nyheter, a daily newspaper.

“These are so-called refugee youths, specifically from Afghanistan. Several of the gang were arrested for sexual molestation,” one police memo said.

But the official police report on the festival didn’t mention the assaults or harassment. No one was prosecuted.… Read the rest

Here’s how to combat hatred – call people cunts. No hatred there, no indeed.

This is Donald.

Donald has made a career out of hating other people.

Donald is a hoofwanking bunglecunt.

Don’t be like Donald.

Oh the envy. Iceland Magazine reports that ZERO Icelanders age 25 or younger believe God made the world. ZERO.

Iceland seems to be on its way to becoming an even more secular nation, according to a new poll. Less than half of Icelanders claim they are religious and more than 40% of young Icelanders identify as atheist. Remarkably the poll failed to find young Icelanders who accept the creation story of the Bible. 93.9% of Icelanders younger than 25 believed the world was created in the big bang, 6.1% either had no opinion or thought it had come into existence through some other means and 0.0% believed it had been created by God.

0.000000000000000%… Read the rest

This happened a couple of days ago: an activist trans man and a feminist woman on Channel 4 News.

The video.

Activist Jack Monroe clashed with a feminist academic during a fiery TV debate on trans issues on Thursday, calling the belief that trans women aren’t women “bang out of order”.

Monroe sat alongside Julia Long, a lecturer in sociology and long-time feminist, on Channel 4 News, after the publication of the first report by the Women and Equalities Committee in Parliament.

It wasn’t “fiery.” There was evident irritation, but no flames. In the next paragraph the Huffington Post said the report “sparked the fury of Dr Long,” which also isn’t true. Neither of them displayed “fury”; it’s … Read the rest

Originally a comment by tiggerthewing on It’s been a long day.

Honestly, talk about privilege – if the worst thing happening in your life is someone calling you female-bodied on Facebook, you have less to worry about than 99% (at least) of humanity.

One of the ludicrous things that I’ve in read comments by people in the so-called ‘trans activism’ group is the objection to calling a woman a ‘vagina-haver’ on the grounds that trans women don’t all have vaginas, and suggest ‘female bodied’ as being inclusive; followed by others saying that ‘female-bodied’ is ‘transphobic’ and we should say ‘uterus-havers’.

If the in-group can’t agree on terminology, why the hell are they coming here and ranting at the rest … Read the rest

Here we have a highly technical explanation of how gender abolition is colonization, by Lola Phoenix.

When mentioning that I don’t identify as a woman, I end up in a lot of debates with people who believe in abolishing gender. Recently, I’ve comprised an explanation of why arguing for the abolition of gender is a form of colonisation.

I think LP means “composed,” not “comprised,” but anyway.

You probably have heard of the philosophy that gender is a social construct. What that means is that, while there may be biological and bodily markers of what we refer to as “gender” (or “sex” as it is just as much a social construction as “gender”), the concept of gender is something

There’s this article from a few days ago at RT. I’m very wary of RT as a source, seeing as how it’s owned by the Russian government, but with that said – it’s still an interesting article.

‘Male-dominant migrant wave threatens Europe’s gender equality’

As European nations continue to accept thousands of refugees, officials are failing to consider that most young adults entering are males, a fact that could have a huge impact on gender equality, says Valerie Hudson, professor at Texas A&M University.

Critics of Europe’s loose and liberal policy towards refugees flooding its shores were galvanized by the harrowing news out of Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve.

I don’t think “loose and liberal” is the right description, … Read the rest

From Deutsche Welle on January 10:

Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas was the latest high-profile politician to speak out about the string of sexual assaults in Cologne on Sunday. In an interview with the popular “Bild am Sonntag” newspaper, Maas voiced his suspicions that the crimes which have the whole country reeling were not the result of an opportunistic mob mentality but a thought-out, planned attack on the city’s women.

“No one can tell me that it wasn’t coordinated and prepared,” the minister said. “My suspicion is that this specific date was picked, and a certain number of people expected. This would again add another dimension [to the crimes].”

The newspaper provided details from official police reports citing the

On the one hand: in general, welcoming immigrants is a good thing, and welcoming refugees and asylum speakers is a moral imperative. On the other hand: there are genuine reasons to think it’s not possible to welcome all immigrants who would like to immigrate.

For one of those reasons, we have what seems to have happened in Cologne and elsewhere in Germany. I emphasize “seems” because accounts differ.

The New York Times yesterday:

As 2016 neared on Dec. 31, however, some 1,500 men, including some newly arrived asylum seekers and many other immigrants, had instead assembled around Cologne’s train station. Drunk and dismissive of the police, they took advantage of an overwhelmed force to sexually assault and rob hundreds

Chris Clarke points out that we don’t really even need a lot of deep background on the armed men occupying Malheur Wildlife Refuge. What they’re doing is stark enough on its own.

Actions speak louder than words, as they say, and in this case the group’s action says it all. They seized land that belongs to you, and now you can’t go there. And they say they’re just getting started.

I suppose this would be more obvious if they had seized the Grand Canyon or Yosemite or Yellowstone, but it wouldn’t be fundamentally different. It’s public land, and they’ve grabbed it, and now we can’t go there. I once knew a dedicated birder who spent two weeks there, his entire … Read the rest

Oh hey, look at this – a news story from Egypt in October 2006.

CAIRO: As Egyptians began their Eid Al-Fitr holidays last week, rumors of a wave of alleged sexual harassment tainted the joy of what is usually a family-oriented festive occasion.

The wave of harassment, manifested by public groping and touching of women accompanied by pushing and shoving and even pulling at headscarves and shirts, has stirred dismay among outspoken young women and men across some popular blogs.

Across these web spaces, which provide a free forum of expression for many, bloggers posted and shared pictures of incidents in which crowds of men harassed women.

In one picture, taken in the downtown area and posted on Misr

Seen on Facebook today:

Being lumped in with women by being called “female-bodied” is insulting to me. So, maybe if you dont want to insult people on your wall then you should heed the words of trans people.

Yeah, really – how gross to be lumped in with those disgusting people, women. What an insult.

Also how dare you say “female-bodied”? There is no such thing. Forget all that business about how sex=bodies and gender=everything else – that’s out of date. A person whose gender identity is male has a male body because that person is male, so obviously HIS body is male. Apologize or be evicted from everything.… Read the rest

The Washington Post reports:

The Supreme Court found Florida’s unique system of imposing a death sentence unconstitutional on Tuesday, saying it gives power to judges that is rightfully reserved for juries.

The decision united the court’s liberals and most of its conservatives, who voted 8 to 1 against the system employed by a state that’s among the leaders in imposing capital punishment. Florida has nearly 400 inmates on death row.

400! That’s downright Saudi.

It seems likely that the ruling will have limited impact outside of Florida, because no other state has exactly the same procedure. Alabama, another state with a higher-than-average history of imposing the death penalty, allows a judge to overrule a jury’s findings about whether the

The BBC yesterday on the Cologne attacks on women:

The men suspected of attacking women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were “almost exclusively” from a migration background, mainly North African and Arab, an official report says.

…

Addressing state MPs on Monday, [North Rhine-Westphalia state’s interior minister Ralf] Jaeger criticised police for not calling for reinforcements on the night, and also for the way they informed the public about the investigation in the days after the events.

His report details how a group of around 1,000 men of North African and Arabic origin gathered on 31 December. Smaller groups formed, surrounding women, then threatening and attacking them, he said.

These groups were predominately made up of North African