Author: Ophelia Benson

  • To any of our beloved prophets

    Hmm. If Dr Aladwan is a medical doctor I recommend not going to her with your flu/migraine/GI disruption.

  • No blasphemy laws thanks

    Naughty man says what now?

  • an election “plan”

    This seems a tad dangerous…

    They’re making a plan to steal the election and trigger a civil war?

    I can’t help thinking that’s not a very good plan.

  • Sir, most people do know

    This is hilarious but also horrifying. It’s called perseveration and it is NOT a good sign.

  • Calling for the cancelation

    You get used to these things.

  • All these other people

    Sir yes sir, that is indeed discrimination.

  • All he expected in return

    Listen, if you get the guy a pardon, you deserve a little respect, know what I mean?

    Last year, Donald Trump pardoned Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who was under indictment for federal bribery charges. All he expected in return was that Cuellar, out of gratitude, would immediately switch parties and become a Republican. To his shock, Cuellar never did. “Many considered this to be a tremendous act of disloyalty,” Trump fumed on Truth Social last night, “and certainly showed him to be an extremely ungrateful person.”

    Don Don Don Don. You’re not supposed to say these things in public! You’re not supposed to admit you expect a quid pro quo when you pardon people!

    He then encouraged Texas voters to vote Cuellar out in November. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: It’s genuinely amazing how little Trump tries to hide his own mob-boss style.

    It’s beyond even how little he tries to hide it, it’s at how much he tries to advertise it.

  • Dignify

    The US Ambassador to Greece:

  • Stock up on the popcorn

    Another lurch downward:

    The Defense Department said in a statement Thursday that the firing squad execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be live-streamed for the public to watch.

    Oh come on. That’s barbaric.

    The announcement came after earlier comments Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made indicating he wanted the execution to be public.

    “He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers. As it should be,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview with far-right political activist Jack Posobiec. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

    …

    Hasan, an American-born Muslim, killed 13 people and injured 32 others at the Central Texas Army post where troops were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.He shouted “Allahu akbar!” meaning “God is great,” before targeting soldiers with a handgun he had fitted with laser sights.

    Serious consequences are one thing, and showing the serious consequences on television is another thing.

  • To the highly accepted

    Also

  • Tick tock

    This right here? This should be enough to Article II him. More than enough.

    Saying “I can do whatever I want” should get him impeached because it is wildly, blatantly, grotesquely unconstitutional – it’s like burying the Constitution in shit and then setting fire to it. No, dunghead, you can NOT do whatever you want. You’re not an absolute monarch, you’re a presider.

    The fact that you spray us with this verbal incontinence every day demonstrates that you should be yanked out of that chair and that building right this second, because you are a lawless tyrannical reckless vindictive pile of shit.

  • Women exist

    Women’s Rights Network Scotland on Facebook:

    Today BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour marks 80 years by broadcasting from Glasgow Women’s Library. A programme built on women’s voices, from a library that no longer means women.

    GWL’s own policy is clear: trans and non-binary people are welcome, and “women-only” events include men who say they are women. In 2019 they walked away from the Audacious Women Festival rather than accept a women-only rule that followed EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces.

    Eighty years of Woman’s Hour. A library founded so women’s history would not be erased. And the BBC chooses a venue that treats sex as optional.

    Women are a sex class. Single-sex spaces, services and history exist because of that. Calling a man a woman does not make him one, and hosting the anniversary there does not make the erasure invisible.

    Women exist as a sex. Single-sex spaces, services and history exist because of that. We were outside in April. We have not gone away.

  • The what department?

    The Free Speech Union wrote on Facebook:

    There is a cover-up at the heart of Government. Ministers have been forced to admit that the “missing” Islamophobia definition documents do exist.

    After pressure from the Free Speech Union and Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy, Angela Rayner’s Communities department has conceded that documents that helped shape the “anti-Muslim hostility” definition still exist, despite previously saying they had been destroyed.

    It now seems almost certain that the Government tried to bury evidence that could show whether Islamist extremists helped draft what amounts to Britain’s de facto Islamic blasphemy law.

    Wtf is a “communities department” anyway? Why are UK governments and institutions so obsessed with putative communities, and so intent on forcing everyone into them? People have things in common with other people on some axes while having nothing in common with them on other axes. Having one idea or project or motive for organizing in common does not automatically amount to a community. It’s stifling and presumptuous, all this shoving people into fake communities whether they like it or not.

    The Free Speech Union has warned that this non-statutory definition will be used — and is already being used — by activists, public bodies and authorities to silence legitimate criticism and debate about Islam, its history and its practices.

    Indeed it is. Of course it is. Bullying over putative “Islamophobia” has been a thing for decades.

  • 5 pillars too many

    Headline:

    John Cleese doubles down as Muslims try to get him arrested for his comments about Islam

    Remember when it was stuffy conservatives who didn’t like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and its stars? Ah, those were the days.

    No, seriously. Those really were the days, because whatever John Cleese and Co. endured from the establishment in the 1970s and 1980s, at least they weren’t trying to drag him into court. Not so much with the British left, which is now in thrall to radical Islamists.

    …The hardcore Muslims are hopping mad. The problem is that in Merrie England, there’s not exactly robust protection for free speech — and now, one prominent Muslim group wants the law to intervene.

    5 Pillars, an Islamist activist outlet in the United Kingdom, reported that there was a “referral to the government’s counter-extremism scheme Prevent concerning comedian John Cleese” because he made fun of Muslims.

    Why so it did.

    Right and that’s bad because Islam is not at all violent in the slightest ever under any circumstances.

  • He don’t like it

    Oh hooray, we’ll get more on his thoughts.

    I can see why the more thoughts won’t be forthcoming until later this month. It must have taken him ages to produce the thoughts we’ve already been privileged to view. It’s dated! Full of harmful narratives! My god the level of insight and verbal dexterity is overwhelming.

  • An episode

    The monks are simply helpless to control themselves.

    The director of the company running the Eiffel Tower will step down at the end of the year, the company said, after an episode this month in which men replaced female employees while members of a prominent Hindu group visited.

    The director, Patrick Branco Ruivo, has run the Eiffel Tower Operating Company since 2018. He is resigning after an internal inquiry “uncovered a series of problems and shortcomings” that “led to the exclusion of female staff” during the tour by members of the Hindu group, the company said in an emailed statement.

    Mr. Branco Ruivo had been under fire since Sept. 5, when union leaders said that female employees had been told to wait out of sight during the tour. Monks of the group, Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, take vows of celibacy that prohibit them from speaking to or touching women, according to its website.

    Wait. Celibacy means not fucking. It doesn’t mean not speaking to.

    What is the matter with these men that they can’t be in the same building as women without putting their vow of celibacy at risk?

    Do these pious guys think women are nothing but objects to fuck? Nothing but that distracting hole?

    Why do vows of celibacy translate to vows of total exclusion of women from everything if there happens to be a monk somewhere nearby? Why do men who take vows of celibacy get to exclude women instead of excluding themselves? What is all this crap? Anyone would think women are rocks or logs or coconuts – just objects to be thrown around by men, as opposed to being human beings just as men are. We’re not a little bit or sort of human like men, we are every bit as human as men. We’re not just walking penis-clutchers, we’re people, and we can talk and think just as men can.

    The decision to sideline the female workers prompted a staff strike that closed the Eiffel Tower to tourists for a day. It also led to apologies from both the tower’s management and the Hindu group.

    Good. Stop pampering these bros who think their religious promises mean that women have to be treated like vermin.

    H/t Mostly cloudy

  • Green as bile

    Suzanne Moore on the Greens:

    This year’s Green Party conference in Brighton, with its obligatory keffiyeh-wearing and performative bans on dissenting groups, was the complete opposite of the tolerant, kind and radical ethos that the Greens believe themselves to embody. The delusion is off the scale. They banned women for thinking that men are not in fact women. They banned a list of everyday words (mothers, fathers) from being uttered by members. They even banned journalists from being present at the actual vote on Israel.

    Maybe by “green” they mean nausea.

    There is no appeasing these people. Worst of all, the Green leadership seems scared of them. Gaza has become the central issue and, incredibly, this vote means that the Greens have gone further than the Palestinian Authority in wanting a one-state solution, which means, of course, the destruction of Israel. And all Israelis.

    The events of this weekend are disgusting. But then this is a party that will not allow women to talk about women’s issues (pelvic health and incontinence) without a load of men protesting that this is not “inclusive”. This is a party in which a woman asked by the journalist Julie Bindel about her views on Hamas said they were simply a “resistance group”. Asked about the Jewish women raped by Hamas terrorists on October 7, the woman replied: “What rapes?” She said this three times.

    The Jew hate has of course been laundered by Zack Polanski, who happily cites his Jewish heritage to help excuse his failure to root out anti-Semitism. He would it appears, betray his own Zionist family in order to cosplay as a political leader. Polanski – ever the coward – skipped the vote as his priority was getting elected in Holborn and St Pancras.

    The belief in the Jewish homeland is core to much Jewish liturgy and the Greens’ new policy deeming that belief “racist” means declaring that the practices of most Jews, secular or believers, are racist.

    No such purity test would ever be applied to Muslims or Christians and not one part of this saves a limbless child in Gaza. This combination of atavistic hatred with fashionable activism is deadly.

    And horribly familiar.

  • Not your call

    Men trying to supervise how women do their feminism.

  • Inclusive for some

    Oxford Council does what now?

    When access to female toilets is “inclusive” then it becomes non-inclusive of women. Access to female toilets should be “inclusive” of female people only.

    A Labour-led council has claimed the furore over single-sex spaces is a ‘manufactured moral panic’ after it passed a motion stating ‘trans women are women.’

    That’s a Trump-level stupid thing to say. No it is not a “manufactured panic” to want women’s spaces to continue to be women’s spaces. If women’s spaces have to include men then there are no longer any women’s spaces. The council might as well say workers have to share their unions with bosses.

    Councillors in Oxford voted on Monday to ensure access to public toilets, community centres and homelessness services remains ‘trans inclusive’.

    It comes despite a Supreme Court ruling in April 2025 defining ‘sex’ within the Equality Act as ‘biological sex’ and ‘sex at birth’.

    The motion was proposed by a Green councillor, who dubbed the Supreme Court verdict ‘discriminatory’, passing with just two votes against and two abstentions.

    It’s “discriminatory” in the way that knowing the difference between night and day, cold and hot, yesterday and tomorrow, carrots and apples, fish and horses, buses and bicycles is “discriminatory”. We’re allowed to know the differences between one thing and another thing, and it can be a matter of life and death to know such differences.

    Speaking at the council meeting, Dr Max Morris, who proposed the motion, said: ‘Unfortunately the EHRC’s code of practice came into effect two months ago causing immense uncertainty. 

    ‘We are living through a manufactured moral panic which has made being trans, non–binary or gender non–conforming in public life both online and offline a daily nightmare for many. This transphobic moral panic has a policing effect on anyone whose appearance or behaviour doesn’t meet the norm.’

    Pause to look up Dr Max Morris.

    Oxford Brookes University tells us:

    Max joined Oxford Brookes University in 2022. Before this, they were based in the Department of Criminology, Politics and Sociology at Kingston University. They completed their PhD in Sociology and Social Policy at Durham University in 2019.

    Academia.edu adds:

    Max Morris is a researcher at Oxford Brookes University (Sociology) focused on Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, Sex Work, and Male Sex Work.

    Focused on destroying feminism, you mean.

    Doctor Max continues:

    ‘This transphobic moral panic has a policing effect on anyone whose appearance or behaviour doesn’t meet the norm.’

    Dr Morris added: ‘Others have highlighted how this policy (the Supreme Court ruling) is discriminatory and why we need to stand together to fight it.

    ‘That’s why we’ve proposed a cross–party working group to ensure we can implement the policy as inclusively as possible.’

    Being inclusive of men by excluding women. Round of applause for Max.

  • Guest post: Alabama recognizes

    Originally a Miscellany Room alert from Sackbut.

    Ivey sets Alabama Girls in Sports Day—and targets trans athletes

    Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed a proclamation Monday establishing October 10, 2026, as “Alabama Girls in Sports Day.”

    The proclamation begins by touting the positive impact athletic participation can have on young girls and celebrating female athletes’ achievements throughout sports history. However, it then fuels the growing antagonism toward transgender women’s participation in sports—an issue that has become a popular talking point among Republican politicians in recent years.

    “Alabama recognizes that there are fundamental biological differences between males and females that create meaningful competitive and safety considerations in athletic competition, particularly in women’s and girls’ sports, and we will continue standing up for women’s opportunity to compete fairly, safely and on a level playing field,” the proclamation reads.

    The document also specifies that October 10 was chosen because of its relationship to the Roman numerals “XX,” which reflect the “two X chromosomes that are characteristic of the female sex.”

    In a separate statement, Ivey declared that “if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if He made you a girl, you are a girl.”

    “We will continue standing up for the opportunity for girls to compete fairly and safely,” Ivey added.

    I think the measure is reasonably worded. The choice of October 10 is perhaps over the top “cute”. Ivey has instigated or supported a number of reasonable measures. However, in general, she and the Alabama legislature have a terrible track record, and many measures, even reasonable ones, are clearly designed to “own the liberals” for political purposes in this deeply conservative state.