Author: Ophelia Benson

This is…alarming. He has the brain power of a wet sponge.

Note the terrified laughter when he says he wants to hug it. They’re trying to pretend he was joking instead of babbling like a two-year-old.

The NY Times published a guest essay yesterday titled We Study Mass Shooters. Something Terrifying Is Happening Online.

Until recently, if asked to profile a typical mass shooter, we would have described a middle-aged man who was socially isolated and in despair. He was not in the grip of a political ideology, nor did he have a mental health condition such as schizophrenia. Rather, he was deeply despondent about a life crisis, perhaps a divorce or a job loss. In attacking a workplace or a group of people he blamed for his problems, he was both exacting vengeance and effectively or literally committing suicide.

Over the past several years, something has changed. We are witnessing the emergence of a different paradigm: a mass shooter no less despairing about life’s hardships but younger, highly connected to online social networks and seemingly convinced that in acting violently he or she is carrying out the only meaningful act possible in a world otherwise devoid of meaning. This shift is highly significant for our understanding of the online-fueled pathologies that afflict our society and for the policies that could help prevent such tragedies.

Consider a recent example. Last month in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, an 18-year-old killed her mother and half brother at home, then opened fire at a secondary school she had attended, killing five students and an educator. In the aftermath of the shooting, amid the expected evidence of the shooter’s despair, there emerged an alarming trail of online activity: On Roblox, a game platform, the shooter had created a game simulating a mass shooting; her TikTok account reportedly featured reposted videos of a mass shooter; she belonged to a gore forum where users can post uncensored videos of violence, which has been frequented by other mass killers; and she had visited the online profile of a 15-year-old girl who killed two people at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., in 2024.

But. There’s a catch. You know what it is, of course. That “she” is not a she. The guest essay starts with a major, repeated lie about the very subject the authors are writing about. They tell us We Study Mass Shooters but what’s the point if they then systematically lie about the sex of at least one of their subjects?

I looked for more information and found that Wikipedia does the same thing.

On February 10, 2026, a mass shooting occurred in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. Jesse Van Rootselaar killed her mother and half-brother at their home before going to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where she killed six people and injured twenty-seven others before killing herself. Van Rootselaar was a former student of the school.

No footnote, no brackets, no warning, no explanation – just the big lie.

My signpost to this outrage was, as so often, Helen Lewis.

It is very strange to publish an article on the gender dynamics of mass shooters and not mention that the two "female" shooters used as flagship examples here were biologically male. Males commit more than 90% of violent crimes. pic.twitter.com/rfx9b2cGzq

— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) March 18, 2026

Once more for those waaaaaaaaay the hell in the back…

Knowing and/or saying that trans women are men is not in any way immoral or ugly or socially reprehensible. Trans women are men; that’s why the “trans” part is there. Women are women; trans women are not women. A table is not a trans chair; the two are different things. Different things are different. A carrot is not an orange, despite the similar color; the two are different things. A bicycle is not a car even though both have wheels; the two are different things. A man is not a woman even though both are human; the two are different things.

Also, check your spelling ffs.

Now there’s a piece of good news.

A federal judge on Tuesday nullified nearly all actions that the Trump administration took to shutter Voice of America, a federally funded news organization that broadcast to countries with limited press protections, including Iran, China and Russia.

Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered more than 1,000 full-time journalists and support staff at the news group to return to work by March 23 and to resume broadcasting operations. The judge’s decision excludes contracted employees.

Judge Lamberth wrote that Congress passed clear laws funding V.O.A. and directing the administration to maintain news operations “in each significant region of the world” that present “a variety of opinions and voices.” But the Trump administration, Judge Lamberth said, flagrantly disregarded the rules in seeking to shutter the news service and its parent agency.

The Trump administration and evil Elon.

The journalists and support staff members at V.O.A. who sued the Trump administration said they want to rebuild the news agency’s reach.

“We are eager to begin repairing the damage Kari Lake has inflicted on our agency,” Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, three of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “We hope the American people will continue to support our mission to produce journalism, not propaganda.”

Especially not Trump propaganda.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Try shutting up.

… trying to force the unachievable on the unwilling….

That’s as good a summary of the whole outrage as I have ever heard.

There’s something about that logic which bothers me. Why the baked in assumptions that the third space must be trans only, rather than inclusive, willing and knowingly participating? It could have been packed with trans women, genderqueers, inclusive feminists and all the so called allies.

Because they wanted to be seen as women, period. Not going into women’s spaces breaks that narrative, and rubs their noses in the mad impossibility of their quest. In their minds, being women “by choice” or “through effort” makes them better women than those lazy, ungrateful women who have femaleness handed to them on a silver platter at conception. Everyone should be rooting for them, the underdogs. They’re oppressed by so-called “cis-women”, who are barring their trans “sisters” from their rightful place in all female spaces. Everyone loves a good rags-to-sequins and glitter story, right, and if they don’t, they’ll be made to like it. Not to mention that it is fueled by classic male entitlement in lipstick and heels.

“Allyship” is a one way street, and is only useful to the extent that it gets them what they want, just like forced teaming. Share the cost, appropriate all the rewards. Do they want to be stuck in the same facilities as all those other wierdos? Fuck no. They DEMAND access to women’s toilets BECAUSE THEY ARE WOMEN! Anything less is hateful bigotry. “Logic” has very little to do with it. Who needs logic when you can just bully your way to your goals? Bulldozers don’t explain, argue, or debate. They just push forward, destroying all obstacles and obstructions.

What a crappy thing to do.

A 40-year-old man is behind bars after causing catastrophic damage to a famed Seattle glass museum located on the grounds of Seattle Center.

On Monday night, just after 11 p.m., the man was arrested for assault and causing over $240,000 worth of damage to the Chihuly Garden and Glass.

Why we can’t have nice things.

Bro has been watching too much tv.

Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma senator chosen by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Homeland Security who will be considered by the Senate on Wednesday, has never served in the US military, but he routinely speaks as if he did in interviews.

Two days after the US attacked Iran, for instance, Mullin told Fox News: “War is ugly. It smells bad. And if anybody has ever been there and been able to smell the war that’s happening around you and taste it, and feel it in your nostrils, and hear it, it’s something you’ll never forget. And it’s ugly.”

He knows this from the movies. No I know he can’t actually smell it from the movies, but he can watch actors pretending they can smell it in the movies. And it’s ugly.

Mullin did not serve in any branch of the US armed forces, but inherited a plumbing company and took part in a handful of mixed martial arts fights, so it is unclear what experience he describes in interviews. According to Axios, which spoke with people who have heard the conversations, the senator has privately hinted to colleagues that he was involved in dangerous private security work in Middle East war zones before running for Congress in 2012.

And that’s smelly stuff. Seriously smelly. Falafel for instance – you can smell that from feet away.

In response to questioning from Democratic senator Gary Peters of Michigan, Mullin said he has never traveled to a foreign country outside of vacation or mission work.

But the day after he spoke of the smell and taste of war, Mullin was asked for his thoughts on Iran by Buck Sexton, a conservative radio host and former CIA officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “You are a veteran, you understand war,” Sexton said in a phone interview with Mullin. “What do you make of what we’re seeing so far?”

“Well, first of all, let me clarify: I did special assignments outside of DoD, now DoW,” Mullin said, referring to the Department of Defense, newly rebranded the Department of War. “I never wore the uniform or the flag on my shoulder. Might’ve been in the same area … but the guys that signed the contract, I got to work alongside of those guys and they’re phenomenal individuals.”

And smelly.

This month was not the first time that Mullin has spoken as if he has been through combat when, in fact, he has not.

In an interview with Fox News on 7 January 2021, the day after he had tried to help Capitol police officers defend the House chamber from pro-Trump rioters, Mullin said: “Some people there got nervous, there’s a lot of members that was in that chamber that never dealt with a situation like that, and I’ll tell you, I’ve never dealt with a situation like that on US soil.”

We’re left wondering what soil he has dealt with it on. Norway soil? Tibet? Paraguay?

Mullin has made similarly cryptic comments in other interviews. In 2023, he told a podcast produced by the Senate Republican conference: “I had to go do something overseas one time, there’s another side of my bio that I’ll never talk about nor will I, but I had to go do something overseas and when I went over there I always let my beard grow out. I’d start letting him grow before I went.”

“When I do these trips, I always come back and shave my beard,” he added.

This guy is truly hilarious.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on It is not what it is.

Professors are being hounded for acknowledging biological sex. Carole Hooven is an EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST who taught AT FUCKING HARVARD no less, and she was hounded out of her job over her plain, simple assertion of the FACT that sex is binary.

I’ll have no fucking truck with this coy playacting that phrasing like “people with wombs” isn’t directly connected to the ugly tribal reaction against the facts of biology that has taken hold among young people.

The primary purpose of such language as “people with wombs” is to appease the ravenous kids who’ve been conditioned to go feral and become outraged at any acknowledgement of biological sex. That’s it. It’s nothing to do with being nice to some hypothetical pregnant butches or whatever. The Venn diagram of, in one circle, females who are willingly and knowingly pregnant, and in the other circle, females who are dysphoric and so deathly incapable of facing the fact that they’re female… that diagram consists of two circles that not only don’t touch, but there’s a football field’s worth of gap between them.

You can tell by the way she describes the whole thing that Annie Lockhart thinks she’s putting her meagre little chips down on the side of the good. In reality, she’s siding with the mob against women’s rights.

Yet again. The madness of crowds warps everyone’s thinking. I see a world of cowards, everywhere I go. No one wants to challenge their tribe…

A vox pop moment.

From a public post on Facebook:

Wut? Terms like ‘people with wombs’ are being sometimes used in medical literature in conversations that are specifically about data connected to people with wombs and that’s how we know the term is not being used as a placeholder for “women”?

This ideology is not good for people’s thinking processes.

Well…

"Is not a slur."
RIGHT. pic.twitter.com/0nhhoSADr6

— Gay Not Queer (@Gaynotqueer1) March 16, 2026

It’s not exactly a slur, true, but it is nevertheless highly objectionable, and not just to the person being called it. It assumes matters not in evidence – it assumes that there are “cis” people and “trans people” when in fact there are only people. Cis would not mean anything without the existence of the word “trans” but the word “trans” names something that doesn’t exist. We don’t need the word “cis” because it’s just the equivalent of real or actual or non-fake. Trans women are real, actual, non-fake men. Trans men are real, actual, non-fake women. It’s simpler to just ignore the fakes and go on knowing which people are which sex the way we always have.

“Cis” is not exactly a slur, but it is a specialty word that exists to legitimize the war on women that trans ideology is. No I’m not going to “try this” when the “this” is pretending there are two kinds of women, fake and real.

Here is the Woman’s Hour segment in case you’re interested. I could only manage a couple of minutes because the guy has nothing to say and he says it excruciatingly slowly and mumblingly in a silly Minny Mouse voice. A car-crash on all criteria.

Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 has discussed 'toxic masculinity' against the backdrop of Louis Theroux's Netflix documentary Manosphere with … a cross-dressing man who talked about the 'misogyny' he experiences pic.twitter.com/5EMw8qvIp7

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) March 17, 2026

Why do they do this?

I suppose I shouldn’t even ask. I suppose they do it for the obvious reason: to insult and harm women. But then why not call it some other kind of hour? Misogynist Hour would fit.

The usual stupid mistake in the title – not Trans Sociologist but Trans Woman aka Man.

Moving on – why do they do this?

They should just admit: because it makes you bitches furious and that makes us laugh. See you tomorrow.

Of course he said that.

Trump: "The prime minster of UK told me 'I'm meeting with my team to make a determination.' I said, 'You don't need to meet with a team. You're the prime minster. You can make your own. Why do you need to meet with your team to find out if you're gonna send some mine sweepers or… pic.twitter.com/1P1TtHtB8t

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 16, 2026

That’s Trump in a nutshell. You don’t need to talk to other people, you’re the boss, you decide everything all by yourself, you don’t need a team, you don’t need information, you don’t need advice, you don’t need understanding, you don’t need a range of views, you don’t need to think – you just do the Big Boy Pants thing, end of story.

A bump in the road for Bad Kennedy:

A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked federal health officials from cutting the number of vaccines recommended for every child, and said U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likely violated federal procedures in revamping a key vaccine advisory committee.

The decision halted an order by Kennedy — announced in January — to end broad recommendations for all children to be vaccinated against flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis and RSV.

On the one hand you have your medically trained people and on the other hand you have a stupid conceited hack who thinks he knows better than everyone despite having zero medical training or education. Wattyagonna do.

Sale ends at midnight! Don’t delay! Offer comes with bag of popcorn!

Nyah nyah I didn’t want to ride your rusty old bike anyway.

Trump on Monday disparaged American allies who have responded coolly to, or outright rebuffed, his call to send warships to escort merchant vessels in and out of the Persian Gulf, complaining that the United States had been defending other countries for decades.

“You mean for 40 years we’re protecting you, and you don’t want to get involved in something that’s very minor?” Mr. Trump said, speaking about the war at a White House event with the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

He went on to say, “We don’t need anybody; we’re the strongest nation in the world,” adding that his request for international help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was really a loyalty test for U.S. allies.

We don’t need your bike, we’re so strong we can go faster without any bike.

“I’m almost doing it in some cases not because we need them, but because I want to find out how they react,” he said.

The “almost” is very good. He’s almost a functioning adult. He can almost find his ass in the dark. He almost doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him.

Mr. Trump’s appeal for an international naval escort, which he issued on Saturday, was the first time he sounded eager to build a broad coalition against Iran. But he was asking for backup from allies who had not been consulted ahead of the U.S.-Israeli decision to begin bombing Iran last month, and who have been mocked by Mr. Trump in the past.

Mocked and worse. Mocked and everything else on the menu. Trump isn’t shy about flinging shit at people.

The United States appears to have been unprepared for the extent of Iran’s retaliation and the need to protect ships in the strait, which also carry fertilizer and other products that help fuel the global economy. Mr. Trump has been pressuring NATO to help, with a sharp warning.

It’s not the US that was unprepared for Iran to refuse to lie down and die. It’s Trump who was unprepared for that obvious possibility.

Trump called on China to send naval escorts, too, but Beijing has little incentive to cooperate; Iran, which sells oil to China, is letting its ships pass safely. 

It’s so sad that none of this was obvious until just a few minutes ago. If Trump had known he wouldn’t have attacked Iran! Poor guy, nobody tells him anything.

Unhinged rant time.

Trump says reporters who cover his war on Iran in a negative manner should face charges of “TREASON”—a crime punishable by death.

The 79-year-old president posted a nearly 400-word Truth Social rant on Sunday slamming Iran for “feeding” the “very appreciative Fake News Media” in the U.S. and even resorting to AI to spread “false information.”

Nobody can compete with Trump in the false information department.

The president also took swings at a reporter from ABC, calling them “one of the most corrupt news organizations on the planet” before refusing to take any more questions from the outlet. When a female reporter asked Trump why the U.S. is sending 5,000 marines and sailors, the president shot back. “You’re a very obnoxious person,” he said, and took a different question from a male reporter.

Just another Monday.

George Chesterton at the Telegraph talks to Rachel Rooney about the Trans Board of Censorship.

“This is the book that ended my career,” says Rachel Rooney, holding a copy of My Body is Me, a picture book for three to six-year-olds published in 2019. You could not find a more innocuous, inclusive and warm-hearted children’s paperback if you tried, yet it led to bitter recriminations for its award-winning creator, a torrent of abuse and ultimately her cancellation by the publishing world.

Her “crime” was to be a gender-critical feminist voice in an industry that was, and largely remains, adherent to a rigid gender ideology.

Rigid, yes, but more to the point, batshit crazy. I think the batshit crazy part should always be at the top of the page. It’s an ideology that flatly denies physical reality and embraces magic. It’s like a brand new Catholic church but without the cookies.

Rooney, now 63, found that being out of step with trans orthodoxy and publicly declaring a belief in the binary nature of biological sex – even when the book in question made no reference to gender or sex – was fatal for the career she had always dreamt of, as well as her livelihood.

Except it’s not a belief. It’s an awareness, an acceptance, a refusal to deny a plain physical reality that everyone is aware of despite all the lies. We don’t “believe” that women are not men, we know that women are not men.

“In 2018, when gender self-ID was being discussed [as part of a consultation on reforms to the Gender Recognition Act], I thought, ‘I can’t not say something. It’s ridiculous.’ So I started speaking up very quietly, just a few things here and there, to people around me or on social media.”

At about the same time, she was contacted by the children’s illustrator, Jessica Ahlberg, on behalf of Transgender Trend, a gender-critical organisation, to ask if she would collaborate on a picture book about body positivity. Ahlberg – the daughter of authors, Janet and Allan Ahlberg, described by Rooney as “children’s literature royalty” – asked her to provide the words for the picture book that became My Body is Me. Rooney’s work was provided for free, and she receives no royalties for any sales.

…

Even before it was published, Rooney was already being attacked by fellow authors on social media for her unfashionable views. In the summer of 2019, she contacted the Society of Authors, her trade union, to point out that the list of “protected characteristics” on its website included gender and gender identity but not sex, which was legally incorrect, and the society agreed to change it.

But, after the book came out, “it just went ballistic among the children’s publishing community, especially following the criticism of [children’s author], Clara Vulliamy”.

In December 2019, Vulliamy posted a succession of messages on X vilifying Rooney and encouraging the organisation that promotes author visits to schools, Authors Aloud UK, not to endorse My Body is Me, saying it propagated an “extreme ideology” that “targets children”.

The “extreme ideology” that says boys are not girls and girls are not boys. The extremiosity is hard to endure.

Rooney used to visit two or three schools a month to supplement her income, but once the attacks became widespread, these bookings stopped completely. She was told by a publisher that some booksellers were refusing to stock her work.

Rooney contacted the Society of Authors to complain that the criticism could constitute restraint of trade because it could potentially damage her ability to make a living, but the official response was that it couldn’t get involved in disputes. It has since transpired from internal emails, after a subject access request Rooney made in 2023, that the matter was passed to the former chief executive, Nicola Solomons, a lawyer who admitted that Vulliamy’s comments were “potentially defamatory”.

But Vulliamy is one of the cool kids, so keep it under wraps.

Is that true?

Reminder that none of my rights, or those of any woman or girl in Ireland are, or ever were, sex-based. pic.twitter.com/tlEZyHED7r

— Bernie Linnane 🏳️‍⚧️ (@Berlinnaeus) March 12, 2026

It’s true that Ireland is very…shall we say delayed, on this matter. That’s why it’s been known to let women die rather than terminate a premature birth. But is it so very delayed that women have no rights specific to women at all? Is rape legalized then?

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Bureaucracies love euphemism.

[“Kinetic”] could certainly be an abbreviation of “fucking hectic”, but what interests me about the word (in the way it’s used by Hegseth & others) is its scientific aura, its suggestion that what is happening is both violent and an index of overwhelming, god-like power, but also that it is mindless (which of course it is in a sense other than the sense I am trying to establish) and mechanical and has nothing to do with human intentions, decisions or responsibility (“kinetic energy” is, according to the OED, “energy which a body possesses by virtue of being in motion”), and so cannot be understood at all in human terms. War has been refined, as it were, into a sort of natural happening that can be understood only through physical laws. What violently happens just happens – it is what used to be called in more religious eras “an Act of God”, as at Sodom and Gomorrah. No-one is responsible for what is happening, particularly not the Trump regime and the Netanyahu regime, so no-one should feel upset or guilty.

I am reminded of how the interesting fascist writer Ernst Jünger represented in his book “Der Friede. Ein Wort an die Jugend Europas. Ein Wort an die Jugend Der Welt” (“The Peace: A Word for the Youth of Europe; A Word for the Youth of the World”) the Nazis’ seizure of power, the Shoah, the destruction of World War 2 as fundamentally a cosmic calamity for which nobody was responsible. That is why I characterise the word “kinetic”as “euphemistic” since it seeks, as does the term “enhanced interrogation”, to conceal actions taken by human beings, and the responsibility for these actions, beneath a quasi-scientific veneer.

“The Peace”, by the way, was intended for Allied readers, not for the German people. Typescripts were circulated, and the authorised version was finally published in Amsterdam in 1943. An English translation was published in 1948 from the right-wing publisher Henry Regnery Company, Hinsdale, Illinois,