From the Sheer Unadulterated Stupidity Files: Hay kidz smoaking iz bakk.

…singers, actors and influencers seem to be bringing smoking back into vogue – quite literally, with cigarettes making a return as on the New York Fashion Week runways earlier this year as accessories.

So, why are cigarettes being glamorised again?

Lucy, a 20-year-old university student, says she took up smoking recently because “it’s just what everyone does”. Almost all her friends also smoke and she says it’s more than just a habit, it’s an aesthetic.

“I definitely think everyone trying to be brat has influenced people to start smoking because Charli herself says you have to have a pack of cigs if you really want to embody the

The NY Times editorial board concisely sums up the bad guy:

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage

OutKick reports:

As OutKick reported earlier Saturday, San Jose State suspended associate head volleyball coach Melissa Batie-Smoose. 

The university sent a statement to OutKick confirming the news, but did not provide a reason. “The associate head coach of the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team is not with the team at this time, and we will not provide further information on this matter.” 

Batie-Smoose filed a Title IX complaint against the school earlier this week alleging that San Jose State showed favoritism for transgender player Blaire Fleming at the expense of the women on the team. 

Following her suspension, Batie-Smoose spoke exclusively to OutKick. 

“We had a match today at 12 p.m. [Pacific Time] versus New Mexico.

Want to play the most boring game on the planet?

Iiiiiiiit’s Pronouns Pairs!

The Scouts have been encouraged to use gender-neutral language and to drop the terms “mum and dad”. Members have been encouraged to guide children through a card game called “Pronoun Pairs”, which has been devised as a way of teaching them about gender identity.

The game uses the character of “Billy the Butterfly” who is “non-binary” to introduce LGBTQI+ concepts to children.

If Billy is “non-binary” why the fuck is his name Billy? Why not Leslie or Alex or Terry?

The game, which has been branded “indoctrination” by critics, coaches youngsters to use gender-neutral pronouns, and a post-game reflection led by older Scouts suggests other ways in

Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan on The non-optional communinny.

The guide references the BSA, so it’s now out of date. After 114 years of being the Boy Scouts of America the name has recently been changed to Scouting America. I only know this from a Telegraph article about the Scouts (no longer Boy Scouts) in the UK being taught about pronouns use by means of a card game, Pronoun Pairs. The whole thing is ridiculous.

[The game] suggests “using ‘sibling’ rather than ‘brother or sister’, ‘everyone’ instead of ‘ladies and gentlemen’ or ‘boys and girls’”. It adds: “You could use ‘parent’, ‘carer’ or ‘grown-up’ rather than ‘mum and dad’.”

I can see that going down well … Read the rest

Behold: a guide to “inclusive scouting”:

A framework for advancing inclusion and belonging that is rooted in the Scout Oath and Law can guide our actions as we move between the different kinds of knowing. But what other guidelines and actions can facilitate inclusion and belonging in alignment with these values? In this section, we offer best-practices and guidelines to help further advance inclusion and belonging in our movement.

…

Meet people where they are. Given the discriminatory history of the BSA, chances are high that not everyone is committed to advancing inclusion and belonging in our movement. Those people are who we should be striving to speak with the most! It is important that we create opportunities for

The Guardian insults us and tries to deceive us yet again.

Imara Jones was filming a documentary on a road trip in California when she took a break to scroll the news. A story about state lawmakers in Idaho banning transgender girls from playing on female sports teams at public schools caught her attention; it was the second anti-trans legislation that Jones had seen passed in 2020. She turned to her producer and told her that they needed to look into “this anti-trans stuff”. 

The Guardian lies to us in the very first sentence. Imara Jones is a man: he took a break to scroll the news.

A year later, Jones launched her podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot

Thanks, Guardian. Even when talking about women’s safety, do be sure to include a man who pretends to be a woman, despite the fact that that kneecaps the whole issue.

Saoirse Ronan’s comment about women’s safety on The Graham Norton Show has gone viral after she said using a phone as a weapon is something “girls have to think about all the time”. Ronan later said the reaction has been “wild” and that the moment was “opening a conversation”.

Here, six women tell us what they think about the comments and how they feel about women’s safety.

Except it’s actually five women plus one man for the sake of inclooooooooosion. Which is like having one tiger in a … Read the rest

If the union won’t stand up for women, women will walk. Janice Turner in The Times:

[Lisa] Lockey, 51, is one of five Darlington nurses in dispute with their NHS trust over its policy of allowing a trans-identified male colleague to use female changing rooms. When the health secretary, Wes Streeting, heard they were suing for sexual harassment and sex discrimination he was “horrified” and offered to meet them. Last week they travelled to London where he heard their concerns, including those of a nurse who has PTSD after being sexually abused as a child.

This meeting incensed North. It was “deeply concerning”, he tweeted, “that Wes Streeting appears to be once again pandering to anti-trans bigotry”. Three

Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on The rules of play.

From the Cass review and various whistleblowers, we can be pretty sure that the castrations are a punishment for the crime of being a little boy who displays all the behaviours associated with a high likelihood of becoming a gay man after puberty. As has been announced in the Westminster parliament, the Tavistock clinic, who were brought little gender-nonconforming children by their panicking homophobic parents, and egged on by the homophobic sociopaths of Mermaids and Stonewall, were openly ‘transing the gay away’.

My siblings and I, and our children, and my grandchildren, were allowed to play with whatever toys we wished. As the meme says, if the toy isn’t … Read the rest

Anne Applebaum on the “vermin” trope:

The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellent: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and

Meanwhile, Twitter itself considers it violence or threats or harassment to say that trans women are men and that men don’t experience rape exactly the way women do because men are more physically powerful than women.

Oh surely not. Surely I exaggerate. Don’t I?

This morning I’m in receipt of an email from the Twitter censors telling me:

Your post was detected by our systems and has had its visibility limited for violating the X rules. Specifically:We have determined your post violated our rules against Hateful Conduct.You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. Ophelia Benson@OpheliaBenson@fran_amery

Any man can declare himself to be a woman without restrictions or security checks.

And that doesn’t mean just call himself a woman in his own living room. It means forcing everyone else to call him a woman on pain of a 10,000 Euro fine.… Read the rest

By “vulnerable people” she does not mean women, or migrants, or refugees, or workers, or lesbians and gay men, or survivors of genocide, or people with physical handicaps, or people of color, or indigenous people, or homeless people, or addicts, or political prisoners…

I am so fucking mad. Sorry Mom. But I am. Where are these people coming from that they think politics is picking on vulnerable people rather than picking people up. Find another job. And everyone else who is appalled, speak up. Because otherwise this is what you get.

— Catherine McKenna (@cathmckenna) November 1, 2024

She means men who say they are women. … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Mosnae on More than just a parade.

I think it’s important to emphasize a distinction in meaning here – in this case, as in most, “LGBTQ+” does not mean (the set of all people referred to by some letter within the initialism), but rather (a fairly specific political movement which purports to represent that set). Of course, the whole movement feeds deeply on conflation and on this idea of a huge, united, sociopolitically monolithic “community,” even though this is not only absurd and self-contradictory given the alleged nature of the community, but also quite patronizing to the individuals it claims to defend, and blatantly in disagreement with reality: there are many “members of the LGBTQ+ … Read the rest

Worse by the hour.

Donald Trump said former Rep. Liz Cheney is a “war hawk” who should be fired upon, as he raged against one of his most prominent intra-party critics while campaigning Thursday night in Arizona.

“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?” the former president said at a campaign event in Glendale with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Hey, same to you, Captain Bonespurs.

Cheney responded to Trump’s comments overnight, saying: “This is how dictators destroy free nations.”

In a post on X, the former

Whether we like it or not.

Donald Trump took his frequent habit of describing himself as a “protector” of women further on Wednesday night in Wisconsin, when he declared he would protect them “whether the women like it or not” if he wins a second term in the White House.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,’” Trump said. “I’m going to protect them.”

Of course he did. That’s how he thinks of women. The best ones are hotties he wants to grab by the pussy and the worst ones tell us what a loathsome lump of flesh he is. Either way we’re not independent humans, we’re just things men get … Read the rest

Nothing is too good for the gender-special.

LGBTQ group ACON given $7 million to produce non-gendered language cancer campaign meant for Indigenous and migrant women

Who needs a “non-gendered language cancer campaign”? What’s the point of such a thing? To spare the tender feelings of the tiny minority of people who think they’re the sex they’re not? To spare those purported feelings by putting real women in danger? Real women who are indigenous or migrant and thus face language barriers? A super-special luxury cancer campaign crafted to obscure the language around cancers that happen to women, in order to make the gender-special feel cuddled and looked after and pampered. The hell with indigenous and migrant women, yeah? They’re just there … Read the rest

London planning bid to host World Pride 2030

Head of Pride in London, Christopher Joell-Deshields, said the gala would be more than “just a parade”, but would accommodate discussions on topics including LGBTQ+ inclusive education and banning so-called conversion therapy. London Mayor Sadiq Khan described the city as “a beacon of inclusiveness, acceptance and diversity”. He added that he was “hugely proud” that London would be in the mix to host the event.

Ok but why so much focus on LGBTQ+ and so little focus on, say, women?

Why not women? Why never women?

There’s never any answer.

… Read the rest

So I walked down the hill to drop my vote into the Voting drop box. I didn’t have to, I could have just dropped it into a mailbox, but I wanted to. It was raining a lot harder than I thought, though, so I got very soaked. After dropping, therefore, I walked a block down to KEXP to warm up and dry off.

KEXP is a few-years-old radio station on the edge of Seattle Center (and next to a bus stop). It has a huge barn-like open space with old couches and chairs and tables and (of course) a little coffee shop in one corner, and we’re all welcome to use it. It’s a very nice and useful public amenity, … Read the rest