Author: Ophelia Benson

When in doubt, destroy everything.

The Trump administration on Tuesday advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.

The proposal by the U.S. Forest Service would repeal the 2001 “roadless rule,” enacted during the Clinton administration to preserve the wild nature of forest land. It comes as President Trump pressures the agency to increase logging and to thin forests to reduce wildfire risk.

If thinning forests reduces wildfire risk then that’s a reason to do it. Increasing logging until all the logs are gone, not so much.

The repeal would hand a major victory to Republican-led states and industry groups that have argued for years that the prohibitions have hindered economic development. More than a dozen lawsuits have unsuccessfully sought to strike down the rule.

Well you see economic development isn’t the only good. It’s one of them for sure, and a major one, but still there are others. Forests are a good. Forests that have not been denuded of most of their trees are a good. They are pollution sinks, just for one thing.

During his first term, Mr. Trump stripped protections from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, only for the Biden administration to restore them in 2023.

This time, the Forest Service is eliminating protections for the nine million undeveloped acres within the Tongass, as well as millions more acres of pristine wilderness across the rest of the United States.

When in doubt, destroy. When in doubt use up something that can’t be replaced. When in doubt, create a desert and call it development.

Environmentalists said the plan would destroy untouched landscapes, including crucial habitats for migratory species and headwaters for major municipal water supplies. Multiple advocacy groups are expected to sue to block the repeal.

“By ripping protections from some of our oldest intact forests, the Trump administration is endangering the drinking water supplies of tens of millions and threatening wildlife habitats and recreation opportunities in almost every state,” said Drew McConville, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization.

Just buy bottled water.

The way to get what you want is to post an image of it.

Trump posted an image of a map on social media Tuesday that labeled the Strait of Hormuz a “new” U.S. territory.

Trump’s post — which was presented without additional comment — came after he said last week that he would “pretty soon” be “declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”

Yeh that too. Declare, and post an image.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi responded to President Donald Trump’s posting of a map labeling the Strait of Hormuz as a U.S. territory by saying the image amounted to a “delusion.”

But a nice delusion! A comforting delusion. A happy delusion.

Special Envoy Jared Kushner said Iran is “not showing any interest” in making a deal that makes sense for the U.S., but noted that dialogue between the two countries is more “robust” than ever.

And by “robust” he means shouty.

Absolutely classic Jolyon.

“Today of all days is very much a day for white people to listen and not to speak”

Continues to do a speech 🤦‍♂️

Jolyon Maugham was the only white person to speak at the Jason Arday vigil

Utter virtue-signalling narcissist pic.twitter.com/Pmegtz7N3i

— MrMenno 🇳🇱🏳️‍🌈🎶 (@MrMennoTweets) August 17, 2026

Check the fine print.

Some people are just a tiny bit curious about Trump’s hostility to South Korea and warm affection for its neighbor to the north.

South Korea’s president said Tuesday a solid alliance with the United States underpins national security, after U.S. President Donald Trump’s abrupt order to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises left many many South Koreans baffled and concerned.

Trump made the surprise announcement in a social media post just before U.S. and South Korean soldiers began Monday’s annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, which are largely designed to sharpen readiness against North Korean threats.

Trump cited what he said was a good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korea’s refusal to join the U.S. war against Iran.

Which is so Trump. He thinks he has “a good relationship” with Kim Jong Un (which of course he doesn’t: Kim is playing him like a fiddle) and that the imagined “relationship” with the boss is all there is to relations between the two countries. He’s mentally a child, and that child gets younger and dimmer every day.

Trump’s move was apparently taken without consultations with South Korea and meant to reach out to Kim, deepening concerns about the reliability of the U.S.-South Korean alliance forged in the turmoil of the 1950-53 Korean War.

That is, concerns about Trump’s understanding of that alliance and what his dimwitted understanding will prompt him to do.

A weakening of the U.S. defense commitment could shake South Korea’s national security as it has no nuclear weapons and is under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” protection, which guarantees a devastating American response in the event of an attack on its ally by nuclear-armed North Korea. The U.S. has about 28,500 troops in South Korea.

Confidence in the U.S. has already eroded among many South Koreans because of Trump’s tariff war and last year’s immigration raid in the U.S. state of Georgia that led to the detention of hundreds of South Korean workers.

…

In his social media post, Trump said the military exercises with South Korea are not only costly but “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which he said “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his time in the White House.

By which he means Kim Jong Un has pretended to be his buddy and he’s stupid enough to believe the pretending.

Think before you cancel.

A venue has accepted that it discriminated against a Jewish comedian when it cancelled his show at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Stand-up comic Philip Simon had been due to perform a solo show called Shall I Compere Thee In A Funny Way at The Banshee Labyrinth, on the city’s Niddry Street. However, the venue pulled his act over what it said were his views on the conflict in Gaza.

His views were too Jewish. Now what does that remind me of…?

In a statement given at the time to industry magazine Chortle, the venue said Mr Simon had expressed views on social media and elsewhere that it said “align with the rhetoric and symbology of groups associated with humanitarian violations”.

Say what? “align with the rhetoric and symbology of”? It’s a venue saying all this? Since when are venues in the business of sniffing out “views” that “align with” a string of pompous quasi-academic verbiage?

Mr Simon took legal action against the venue’s owner, Morrison Bros Ltd, claiming it had discriminated against him on the grounds of “unlawful belief-based discrimination”.

And used pompous verbiage to do so. The pompous verbiage is important here. It allows and encourages people to think they’re saying something both reasonable and important, when they’re not.

There’s always new dirt. The avalanche of dirt outpaces our ability to keep track of it.

Exactly one year ago this week, Donald Trump threatened to impose “harsh measures” on the state of Colorado unless it agreed to release election denier Tina Peters from prison several years before her sentence runs its course. The degree to which the president was serious is still coming into focus.

The New York Times reported late last week, for example, that as Trump publicly condemned the Rocky Mountain State for incarcerating a convicted felon, the White House organized an urgent “brainstorm call” with five federal agencies, with the goal of exploring ways to curtail federal support to Colorado. The meeting, evidently, was a success — at least as far as the administration was concerned.

That’s…not how this is supposed to work. It’s just unabashed racketeering. “Cut her loose or you’ll have Johnny Filth on your tail for the rest of your life, which may be short.”

The [day after the “brainstorm call”] the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy, whose representatives were invited to the brainstorm, announced they were canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for Colorado projects.

State officials say the email, which was revealed in a federal court hearing on Tuesday, is the clearest evidence yet that the Trump administration marshaled government resources to retaliate against Colorado over its use of mail-in ballots and its conviction of Ms. Peters, a county clerk who was found guilty in a plot to tamper with voting machines after the 2020 election.

So we’re not allowed to prosecute election fraud now if it’s Trump who benefits from the fraud.

The Times summarized late last year, “Miffed at Colorado’s votes against him in three successive elections and furious at its refusal to free Tina Peters, a convicted election denier and ardent Trump supporter, Mr. Trump has opened an assault against the Democratic-run state. His administration has cut off transportation money, relocated the military’s Space Command, vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires.”

That last one is particularly nice. No disaster relief for you because this one crook went to prison.

A few months later, the Republican administration also took steps to dismantle a renowned science lab in Colorado, which also appeared to be an extension of an aggressive retaliation scheme.

But while the pattern is not new, what is new is the newly disclosed document: We’re now aware of an email, sent by White House special assistant Emily Underwood just days after the president published a series of messages related to Peters, which reinforces rather obvious suspicions that the administration’s campaign against Colorado was not a mere coincidence: Team Trump set out to punish the state, and then took a variety of steps to execute that plan.

They’ll be arresting and torturing people’s children next.

Will they?

Outrageous.

Let’s see the few republicans to speak up actually blame Trump here instead of “bad advice” pic.twitter.com/lU6ybjNLij

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@AdamKinzinger) August 16, 2026

Yes but that’s not what any of this is about.

Trump announced Sunday that the United States would reduce military exercises with key regional ally South Korea, just hours before they were due to get underway, citing his positive relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Seoul’s lack of assistance with Iran.

“Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

But his “relationship” with Kim Jong Un is beside the point, even if you are as gullible as Trump is about the reality of that relationship. Even if the two of them were great friends, that would not translate to North Korea’s being a friend and ally. At all. Not even the tiniest little bit.

“These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

North Korea is not a person, and Kim Jong Un is not actually a loving friend of Trump’s.

Ummmm…yeah.

What could possibly go wrong?

The SNP just will not stop defying the law.

Public bodies will be forced to consider gender identity under a proposed Scottish human rights bill that threatens to undermine the Supreme Court’s ruling on sex.

The draft Human Rights Bill for Scotland, due to be discussed at Holyrood in the coming weeks, contains a clause that would force public bodies to consider “gender identity” when forming policies and delivering services.

…

That would directly contradict the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025, which clarified that the definition of a woman is based on someone’s biological sex, not what gender someone feels they are.

On account of how biological sex is real and inescapable, while what _______ people feel they are can be anything and everything and is of interest only to the feeler.

SNP ministers have repeatedly attempted to frustrate how the Supreme Court ruling is implemented by fighting legal challenges over its schools and prisons policies. 

On both occasions, the campaign group For Women Scotland (FWS) has successfully argued the policies, which allowed for biological males to enter female-only spaces, were unlawful.

Do two occasions amount to “repeatedly”? Clumsy writing is clumsy.

FWS said a Scottish human rights bill could become the latest example of the Scottish government attempting to bypass the Supreme Court ruling. The group warned that it was “almost guaranteed to be another law that will end up in the courts”.

A FWS spokeswoman said: “Putting gender identity into Scots law is hugely problematic. The Equality Act recognises the right not to believe in the concept of gender identity yet the Scottish government plans to legislate for a compulsory belief in it and for public bodies to take it into account.”

Which will be like legislating for a compulsory belief that people are whatever movie star or footballer or rock star or charismatic tv host they say they are.

Originally a comment by The Whimster Gap on A clause.

Part of me wonders what the Scottish Government – and, in particular, the SNP-Green majority – is playing at; and part of me thinks that it is simultaneously a clever and stupid political strategy.

Here’s the thought. The SNP now has several years’ experience trying to pass TRA-inspired hooooman rights legislation. Irrespective of the merits or demerits of these instruments, cooler heads within the Party must know that its attempts are doomed to founder on the rocks of the wider constitutional arrangements of the UK. So what gives?

Well, there’ll be a good chunk of the SNP vote that is simply wedded to the idea of Scotland leaving the Union, and they’ll vote SNP irrespective of its other policies. Another chunk will be protest voters: they don’t particularly like Labour or the Tories, and are looking for an alternative. That explains why there’s a nontrivial group of Reform voters, too – it’s just a matter of whether your protest vote is left-facing or right-facing. Neither of these constituencies is necessarily be-gendered. But by embracing genderwang, the SNP has mopped up that constituency, too.

Why, though? Why are the cooler heads in the party willing (with just a couple of exceptions) to go along with that?

And the answer is that it’s precisely because it runs into, and is incompatible with, the law not just in the rest of the UK, but of the rest of the UK.

Let’s say you’re a Holyrood government that wants to leave the Union. One part of doing that is to erode the legitimacy of UK institutions. But you can’t really complain that they’re undemocratic – not straightforwardly, granted that the Scots have twice as many elected representatives as the English – and so the national liberation stuff won’t wash. What you can do, though, is to get your devolved parliament to pass laws that you know will be unacceptable to the Scotland Office, or will be challenged in the UK Supreme Court. And you’ll lose.

But in losing, you win something else. Now you’ve got an arrow to shoot: here’re institutions based in Westminster, or UK-wide, that are undermining the policies of, and laws passed by, the elected Scottish government. And that’s going to breed resentment, and to strengthen the calls for more devolution and for leaving the Union entirely. You could even throw in a few claims about colonialism if you wanted. They’d be bollocks, but that doesn’t really matter.

It’s not quite a matter of engineering a constitutional crisis, but it is a matter of scraping away layers of legitimacy.

And if that is the strategy, it’s quite clever. It’s also quite stupid, because imagine your manifesto for a new nation-state being tethered to such a daft idea. But that’d be a problem for another day.

By the way: the Bill is intended to include CEDAW, so I’m really interested to know how they’re going to square that with the TRA stuff.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on About that Dormition thing.

Is everything that exists the product of one supernatural guy who gave an order? (If so, doesn’t that require another supernatural someone, and another for that one, and infinite regress?)

And they can’t/won’t even avail themselves of the claim that it’s turtles all the way down.

Why does it make more sense to claim the eternal existence of an uncreated, all-powerful, supernatural intelligence than it is to theorize the emergence of the entire universe from nothing (or whatever it arose from)? The god hypothesis introduces an unnecessary step. And introduces problems they can’t address. An eternal supernatural being waited for, essentially, to the closest approximation, an infinite amount of time before creating the universe. What was he/she/it/they doing before coming up with the bright idea of making…everything. Must have been awfully boring and/or lonely. And, given all the prep time they had, you’d think that they’d have come up with something more perfect, without all the ad-hoc, jury-rigged contrivances (especially the biological ones) that you’d expect from an undesigned universe that had arisen naturally, all on its own.

The best you might be able to hold out for is a deistic position, wherein your supernatural First Cause sets up initial conditions to get things started, and then buggers off and leaves the universe the hell alone to unfold as it will. But that’s not what all those supposedly sacred books claim. They all assert the existence, and the continuing influence and interference, of a god with an all-too-human personality, who gets pissed off when humans don’t worship him (it’s always a “him”) enough, or in the right way, and who blames humans for choosing incorrectly when exercising the “free will” with which he has so thoughtfully burdened us.

[In one of the oldest horror stories ever, this god does such shitty job of world-making on his first attempt that he destroys it ALL (save for one family and all the animals they could cram on an impossible, wooden boat) and boots up Earth 2.0 using those few designated survivors (with no regard for the inevitable inbreeding depression that would have been brought about by the absolute narrowest of genetic bottlenecks possible). Not only was this god such a talentless fuck-up in his first attempt, necessitating (in his own thin-skinned, blinkered view,) a complete rewrite, he used the bluntest of instruments possible: omnicide. No drone strikes for him (hello, LIGHTNING?). He didn’t even go postal, but went right to the nuclear option, without discriminating between the guilty and the innocent, drowning all those animals and plants (who, being supposedly lesser, lacked by definition human free will, and could not be at all guilty of any of the human crimes and blasphemies which had caused this god to repent of his own handiwork). Over-reaction much? Why anyone would think this is a good story for children, or that this could possibly be used as a positive portrayal of their god is beyond me. This is the story of the ultimate abusive relationship. OBEY ME AND LOVE ME, OR I WILL KILL EVERYTHING. Oh, and take this pretty rainbow as a symbol of my promise that I won’t do this again.]

If we think that can’t be right, and we point to all the reasons for thinking so, is that monoculture or is it just…well, thinking?

These academics aren’t interested in leveling the playing field. They want to raze the stadium and muzzle or kill all of the opposing teams. If they had the power they wish they had, they would (c.f. any officially Islamist state in the present, any officially “Christian” state in the past). Because once they’ve silenced science, they’ll go after all of the other religions which are not the officially sanctioned on (c.f. most of recorded history). To paraphrase the key line from The Conversation, “They’d kill us if they had the chance. These sects do not worship the same god, and they’ll happily, joyously turn on each other to prove it. “Religion” is not monolithic, except in its fictionality.

Most Christians, Jews, and Muslims have managed, for the most part, to start quietly disregarding some of the most of barbarous commands and prescriptions laid down in their scriptures, exchanging the cruel, unanswerable diktats of an absentee god acting through “his” priests and imams, in favour of the manifest benefits of a secular, multi-cultural armistice. But this progress is neither inevitable or irreversible. We have in the last century alone, multiple examples of constitutional breakdowns leading to political extremism, which can be seen, in their obvious cultishness and demands for total authority and obedience, as examples of religious extremism wearing the guise of politics, as the humans in question have aspired to god-like power. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, the Kims, Trump, all have sought the path of power laid out by religious precedent. They claim omniscience and omnipotence (though claiming and possessing are two quite different things, with the latter being, admittedly, at least in the sphere of human affairs, a bit easier than the former). And of course it’s all for the “common good” or the “worthy” or the “loyal,” with the evil, unworthy, or disloyal righteously punished. Even unto death.

But while these megalomaniacs rise and fall, as they die and disappear, the abrahamic religions these mere mortals envy and mimic are able to carry on, generation on generation, millenia after their founders have died. Now that’s persistence. When will these structures and templates, enacted and perpetuated solely through human agency (there is no god behind the curtain, only men), be seen as distant, quaint, harmless fictions like the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse pantheons?

Michael Deacon in the Telegraph:

From 1958 to 1978, the BBC broadcast The Black and White Minstrel Show: a series featuring white entertainers who had caked their faces with ridiculous make-up, in order to impersonate black people. These days, the BBC is understandably rather embarrassed about this. So much so that, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, it published an article on its website, wondering how on earth its past bosses could have been so blind.

“It didn’t seem to occur to anyone in a position of authority at the BBC that the series really was offensive to more than just a few ‘killjoys’,” the article lamented. As a result, “this infamous programme” constituted “arguably the BBC’s most glaring failure to understand the damage it could do when it traded in outdated stereotypes”.

True enough. I’ve got just one question.

If, as the BBC now accepts, it’s wrong to show white people dressing up as grotesque parodies of black people, how come it’s fine – indeed, wonderfully enlightened and progressive – to show men dressing up as grotesque parodies of women?

WHY INDEED???

I’ve asked this question a billion times.

I only ask because the BBC’s peculiar fixation with drag queens shows no signs of abating. Just this week, Newsnight invited one to participate in a discussion of the UK’s floundering economy. Perhaps we could boost quarterly growth if we each buy a pair of size 12 stilettos.

Meanwhile, the BBC has been eagerly plugging the new series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. Apparently we can look forward to meeting contestants who use such charming stage names as “Anita Piss”, proclaim themselves to be a “Bikini Bottom Bimbo”, declare that they’re “feeling lit to the tits”, and challenge the “other girls” to “step their pussies up”.

No doubt the BBC would argue that this is harmless, light-hearted entertainment, to which only killjoys could object. But then, 50 years ago, that’s what its bosses said about The Black and White Minstrel Show.

And they know that, so Beeb please do explain to us what the difference is.

Theocracy replaced by genderocracy. You are required to believe in magical spiritual immaterial gender to the exclusion of literal physical sex.

Public bodies will be forced to consider gender identity under a proposed Scottish human rights bill that threatens to undermine the Supreme Court’s ruling on sex.

The draft Human Rights Bill for Scotland, due to be discussed at Holyrood in the coming weeks, contains a clause that would force public bodies to consider “gender identity” when forming policies and delivering services.

Well why stop there? If public bodies have to consider magic gender why don’t they have to consider all the magic ideas people have about themselves? If the law says self-image trumps material reality then all our ideas about ourselves, no matter how grandiose or conceited or absurd, should logically be allowed to trump the humble facts.

Campaigners say this goes far beyond the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” in the UK’s Equality Act — and fear it would “legislate for a compulsory belief” that people who believe they are women are women.

Equality laws should have nothing to do with in the head ideas about the self such as magic gender, but that ship has unfortunately sailed.

That would directly contradict the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025, which clarified that the definition of a woman is based on someone’s biological sex, not what gender someone feels they are.

And perpetuate this endless stupid childish game we’ve all been forced to play or be punished for refusing to play.

A FWS spokeswoman said: “Putting gender identity into Scots law is hugely problematic. The Equality Act recognises the right not to believe in the concept of gender identity yet the Scottish government plans to legislate for a compulsory belief in it and for public bodies to take it into account.

That’s the thing. This is a belief. It’s not an external objective fact, it’s a fluffy interior idea, and nobody should be forced to pretend to believe it.

Last year the Scottish government reintroduced the idea of a human rights bill. 

…

In addition, there would be an “equality duty” implemented, which would require public authorities, such as councils and the NHS, to consider how they can deliver the ICESCR rights while designing policies and delivering services.

The proposals, ministers admit, “have evolved to explicitly” include “additional grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, ethnic origin and disability”.

Sneaky sneaky sneaky. Those last three are objective external facts. Sexual orientation is the outlier, in being internal and in a sense subjective, but it does have a long well-documented history of persecution, and it doesn’t trespass on other people’s rights. Genner idenniny doesn’t and does.

A Scottish government spokesman said: “The Scottish government accepts the Supreme Court judgment. The proposed human rights bill will not overturn this decision.

“Since April last year we have been taking the necessary steps in response, making changes to policies and guidance impacted by the judgment.”

And yet here we are.

Reduxx reports:

A veteran University worker in Brazil has been sentenced to 1 year in prison for “misgendering” a trans-identified male student. Luís Adripaulo Mendes Barros was charged under the nation’s notorious “social racism” law after a trans-identified male student reported him to police for “transphobia.”

The incident occurred on October 14 of 2022 at the Federal University of Paraíba, one of the two main public Universities in the coastal eastern state of Paraíba, Brazil. That day, a male student named Odara Moraes entered one of the women’s washrooms on campus only to be confronted by a female janitor who challenged his presence in the women’s facilities.

Speaking to Reduxx last year, the female janitor noted that she was initially confused by Moraes, seeing him as a biological male wearing a “crop top and mini skirt.” But the janitor, whose name Reduxx is withholding for her privacy, politely informed him that he was not in the correct washroom, a statement she said had not been intended to cause offense.

Doesn’t matter what it was intended to. What matters is the feefees of the man in the crop top and miniskirt.

Moraes immediately became combative, pulling out his phone to begin filming her and calling her “transphobic.” He also demanded that she refer to him with feminine pronouns.

He was thrilled. A victim!

Upon realizing that the janitor was a contracted employee at the University, he demanded to speak with campus administration. Unsure of what else to do, the janitor brought Moraes to the office of Luís Adripaulo Mendes Barros, the school’s administrative director. During the short journey to the office, Moraes continued to lambast the female janitor, calling her names and accusing her repeatedly of transphobia.

Barros attempted to de-escalate the situation, but Moraes refused and instead repeatedly asserted that he would call the police and press charges against the janitor for “transphobia” – a criminal offense in Brazil.

Unsure of what to do, Barros asked Moraes if he had any documents proving he was legally a woman, but Moraes responded that his “word” should simply be enough. As Moraes continued to insist he was a ‘woman,’ Barros attempted to calmly clarify: “You are trans, not a woman.”

Moraes then stormed out of the office screaming that he had been “discriminated against.”

Four days later, both the janitor and Barros were contacted by police, informing them they were under investigation for criminal transphobia.

…

The female janitor ultimately lost her job after the school refused to renew her contract, and she was left unemployed after almost more than a decade. After being made aware of their situation, MATRIA Brazil, a women’s rights organization, stepped in to offer legal assistance to the two workers and launched a fundraiser to assist the janitor support her family.

Both the janitor and Barros were formally charged in October of last year with aggravated prejudice under the classification of “social racism,” an offense created by Brazil’s Supreme Court in 2019 when it found that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity was in fact covered under already pre-existing anti-discrimination laws relating to race or national origin. The trial itself began in March of 2025, and concluded in June of 2026.

15 months! Because a man invaded a women’s toilet and then bullied the two people who told him he was in the wrong toilet!

The female janitor was acquitted of her charges, with Judge Manuel Maia de Vasconcelos Neto determining that he was unsatisfied that her conduct, in her particular role and circumstances, met the standard for criminal conviction.

Barros, however, was found guilty because the court determined that he knowingly and authoritatively denied the transgender student’s “right to use the bathroom” corresponding to his self-declared gender identity, and rejected his explanations that he was merely protecting women or following his duties.

It’s insane and disgusting and evil.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on If the rationally indefensible is the point.

I think the rationally indefensible behaviour is seen more among the activists who defend “trans” than by trans-identifying people themselves.

The trans population itself is small and mostly a hodgepodge of people in various states of mental disarray, disorder, and distress. (Well, plus a lot of horny chancers and charlatans.)

The progressives who back the movement are much more numerous than the trans-identifiers themselves, and this group, a great, rabid cheerleading squad, seems to be caught up in a spiral of tribalist-identitarian loyalism, and this spiral seems to be fueled in large part by the fact that the tenets at the heart of trans are plainly unbelievable.

Belief in extraordinarily unbelievable things is a remarkably consistent feature across cults and extreme religions. That’s probably got something to do with how it pits the rational part of the brain — the one that can detect bullshit if it actually applies itself to analyzing the thing — against the tribal part of the brain — the one that says anything that might threaten your tribe or separate you from it is a threat that must be shut off. Ergo: if your tribe believes something crazy, you must shut off your critical thinking function or you could be ousted from the group.

The internal conflict between the two impulses of the mind is like a Chinese finger trap: the harder your critical thinking mind tries to pull out, the more your tribal-loyalty mind tightens its grip.

Originally a comment by Papito on An academic project.

It could never be enough to “intellectually dispel” ideas like evolution or laws of physics. Intellect is not the route through which one may dispel such ideas. Inevitably, violence is the route through which these ideas will be dispelled.

The first step towards this inevitable violence is the installation at the university of an individual who wants to guide the university away from intellect and towards submission. The second step is for that individual to tell students that when the university tries to encourage them towards intellect and away from submission that this is harm done to them. The third step is to compare the harm done by, say, stabbing a professor who teaches evolution with the supposed harm done to students whose minds may be lead away from submission by hearing about evolution. After that, it’s just a matter of time and probability.

Ahmed’s purpose in being there is to destroy the university, and her colleagues think that’s really cool. She wants to get one of her colleagues killed, and she will succeed. That murder will be hailed as liberatory by the people who celebrated October 7.

Ahmed wasn’t just making coffee at the terrorist group, she wrote the part of their doctrine about education. Ahmed: “the Muslim community as a whole in Britain needs to recognise that western education is a threat to our beliefs and values”. The university is so dedicated to free expression that they accept the expression of the idea that there should be no freedom of expression, and no university.

Hey kids, it’s time to learn about the “assumption” of “the blessed Virgin Mary” (the one that had a baby, ya know).

So get ready for the treat because heeere’s Vatican News:

The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was already being celebrated on 15 August in the 5th century. It bore the sense of Our Lady’s “Birth into heaven”, or in the Byzantine tradition, her “Dormition”.
 

The feast began to [be] celebrated in Rome in the middle of the 7th century. It was not until 1 November 1950, that Pope Pius XII proclaimed the Dogma of Mary’s assumption body and soul into heaven.
 

Wull…why? Why did it take so long? Why did it take six or seven (depending on how you count) centuries before the feast began to be celebrated? Why didn’t they get right down to celebrating it the minute Jesus zoomed up to sit on the left hand (or was it the right?) of Mr God? What was the holdup? Six (or seven) centuries is a long time! Imagine Mary sitting up there all disgruntled and irritated at being ignored. So typical. They probably made her clean up after dinner, too.

In the Apostles’ Creed, we profess our faith in the “Resurrection of the body” and in “life everlasting”. This is the ultimate goal and meaning of our life’s journey.

Well sure; it naturally would be if it were true. It isn’t true though. Bodies don’t get resurrected and life is very much not everlasting. Go visit an active battlefield some time and you’ll see.

This promise of faith is already accomplished in Mary, who is the “sign of sure hope and comfort” (Preface). It is a privilege granted to Mary, and closely connected to her being the Mother of Jesus.

Oh. Well if Preface says she is the sign of hope and comfort, who are we to dispute it? As for its being closely connected to being Jesus’s mommy, well no shit. What the hell else would it be connected to? Her talent for basket-weaving as a schoolgirl? Her secret recipe for fig ice cream? Her dancing?

Since death and the corruption of the human body are consequences of sin, it was not right that the Virgin Mary – who is free from sin – should be affected by this natural law.

In other words you’re making up the rules, so the rules are what you’re making up. Everybody else does sinning, but this one woman doesn’t do sinning because we want to make her The Top Best Shiny Holy one, therefore we solemnly declare that she is freefromsin. Yes really. We promise! We swear! Well not swear exactly, but we say very seriously and loudly and with no giggling.

The fact that Mary has already been assumed into heaven is a reason to celebrate, to rejoice, to hope in the “already and the not yet”.

To hope? Aren’t you supposed to be certain of all this? Isn’t that the whole ballgame? What’s this shit about hope? We don’t put chewing gum wrappers in the collection plate for hope, you know, we want cash on the table.

One of God’s creatures – Mary – is already in heaven. With her, and like her, we too, who are God’s creatures, will one day be there too.

Yeah but what about all those other people in between? You forgot to mention them. All the people who lived between Mary and now.

And when you say “one day” what do you mean? How far off is one day? Like, ten years? Hundreds? Millions? Do you actually mean it the way parents mean “Yes yes we’ll get you a race car one day” just to shut little Billy up?

The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, body and soul, is an eloquent sign of how not only the “soul” but also the “body” is included in the biblical observation that “God found it very good” (Gn 1:31), so much so that in the Virgin Mary, “our flesh” would be assumed into heaven.

Uh huh. Sure it will. We know all this is true, because you keep saying it.

Andrew Gilligan at The Spectator:

An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to “actively resist” the science of evolution.

At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture.”

Well it’s a “monoculture” kind of thing, in a yes or no sort of way. Is everything that exists the product of one supernatural guy who gave an order? (If so, doesn’t that require another supernatural someone, and another for that one, and infinite regress?) If we think that can’t be right, and we point to all the reasons for thinking so, is that monoculture or is it just…well, thinking? Why is One Magic Dude more polycultural than a more detailed body of knowledge about the origins of matter, of stars and planets, of biological creatures?

It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday.

[To belabor the obvious, this was written before Arday’s suicide.]

The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Ahmed’s extraordinary CV, and her long record of grossly bigoted, extremist and separatist views, were revealed by a 2002 pamphlet exposed by The Spectator on Tuesday.

That takes my breath away a bit. What is Cambridge doing making a religious fanatic an assistant research professor of education?

IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree. Camtree is a project of Hughes Hall, the Cambridge University college where Ahmed is a governing fellow. Ahmed is also an “affiliate” of Camtree.

IELC publishes on its website, with a Camtree address, a paper on “Islamic scientific critical consciousness” which asks: “Does the common modern biological assumption that humans have common ancestry with other life forms conflict with [Islamic] religious beliefs about God creating Adam and Eve?”

Note the word “assumption”. It’s not actually an assumption. It’s the “Islamic religious beliefs” that are based on assumptions, aka one book written by one ignorant fanatic hundreds of years ago. Putting the word “religious” in front of the word “beliefs” does not make the beliefs true or well-founded.

The paper says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.”

Note the words “colonial hegemony”. Some forms of “hegemony” are good to have. The hegemony of science in science education is one of those forms.

It adds that “fitna” (trial or temptation) “may occur, for example, when a Muslim student in the science classroom begins to believe that humans emerged on Earth without any role played by the Creator.”

It says that fitna “boil[s] down to two beliefs being inculcated in students that are problematic from an Islamic standpoint,” namely that “the meaning of existence is socially constructed as an evolutionary response. There is no afterlife or soul; and the universe exists by chance, and runs according to mindless laws of physics…. To counter these hegemonic ideas, it is not enough just to intellectually dispel them. Rather… it is necessary to also instil within students a capacity to actively resist the influence of this monoculture.”

Ah yes, resist the influence of the scientific monoculture and replace it with the Islamic monoculture. Such an upgrade.

No more water, the fire next time.

Millions of people across England and Wales received an emergency alert to their phones on Friday as the government warned against activities that could start fires.

The deputy prime minister, Louise Haigh, said it was the most extensive use to date of the emergency alert system, with phones beaming a siren noise about 7pm, with the warning: “There is a serious risk of wildfires nationally.”

People have been urged not to light barbecues, campfires, fireworks or anything else that could spark a blaze while the wildfire risk remains high. They have also been urged to call 999 immediately if they spot a fire.

…

It has been a record year of wildfires in England and Wales: the number so far this year has passed the 1,017 recorded in 2025. Fire services have declared 11 major incidents in a 24-hour period starting on Thursday.

So last year was a record and this year is a new record. Not a good trend.