I find news from American Atheists in my email.

As the Board Chair of American Atheists, I’m writing you today with some difficult news: Due to escalating threats to civil liberties, human rights, and international relations under the Trump Administration, the board and staff of American Atheists have withdrawn our organization as host of the 2026 World Humanist Congress, originally scheduled to be held next August in Washington, D.C.

The Board of Directors takes seriously our duty to ensure the safety of our members and the continued ability of American Atheists to carry out its mission. This decision was not made lightly. It comes after a thorough evaluation of our organization’s ability to successfully host and safely execute an event

It seems we have turned a corner.

BBC bosses have backed a television presenter who corrected the phrase “pregnant people” to “women” while broadcasting live, in what has been welcomed as a rejection of gender-neutral language.

Martine Croxall, 56, was citing a study about protecting vulnerable people in hot weather and, after reading out the report’s phrasing, immediately rolled her eyes and changed the wording to “women”.

“Malcolm Mistry, who was involved in the research, says that the aged, pregnant people … women … and those with pre-existing health conditions need to take precautions,” she said.

I gotta say, it was a very minimal eye roll. It was such a minimal eye roll that it’s hard to distinguish from … Read the rest

Everything is our fault.

A Florida Republican congresswoman is blaming fearmongering on the left for the reluctance of hospital staff to give her the drugs she needed to end an ectopic pregnancy that threatened her life.

Kat Cammack went to the emergency room in May 2024 where it was estimated she was five weeks into an ectopic pregnancy, there was no heartbeat and her life was at risk. Doctors determined she needed a shot of methotrexate to help expel her pregnancy but since Florida’s six-week abortion ban had just taken effect medical staff were worried about losing their licenses or going to jail if they did.

While Cammack risked losing her life. Remember Savita Halappanavar?

Cammack looked up the

Originally a comment by Papito on The CIA or the Koran.

The comment that leads this is mostly nonsense. “Since the war with Iraq, Iran has kept within its borders, has not attacked its neighbours.” displays a level of ignorance about middle-east affairs it is hard to believe isn’t motivated. Iran has funded a network of terrorist organizations that have been instrumental for decades in keeping countries around the region from developing. Lebanon would not be the mess it is, or Yemen, or Syria, without the Iranian terrorist network having perverted their politics for decades, all so it could persecute the Jews – many of whom were chased out of those very countries to Israel.

Meanwhile, back in reality, … Read the rest

The Times has a long crushing despair-inducing piece by Eli Saslow on vaccine denialism and the return of measles. Very worth reading.

Twenty-five years after measles was officially declared eliminated from the United States, this spring marked a harrowing time of rediscovery. A cluster of cases that began at a Mennonite church in West Texas expanded into one of the largest outbreaks in a generation, spreading through communities with declining vaccination rates as three people died and dozens more were hospitalized from Mexico to North Dakota. Public health officials tracked about 1,200 confirmed cases and countless exposures across more than 30 states. People who were contagious with measles boarded domestic flights, shopped at Walmart, played tuba in a town parade

Bros before hos.

Very telling that Stephen Fry felt unable to tell Douglas Murray, Richard Dawkins or the hosts of Triggernometry that they had been radicalised by terfs for holding the same views on gender woo as JK Rowling.
Did the cat have his tongue, or was it sex selective criticism? pic.twitter.com/wHGRxW9eCg

— Littlest HOMOsexual (@HomoLittlest) June 22, 2025

Yes, it was sex selective criticism. Men are basically good at heart, women are basically witches.… Read the rest

Another bad road we’re going down – the old False Accusation to Justify Authoritarian Moves ploy.

After New York City comptroller Brad Lander this week became the latest prominent Democrat to be arrested while monitoring and protesting US immigration authorities, the Trump administration trotted out a familiar refrain to justify his detention.

The mayoral candidate had “assaulted” law enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asserted, warning “if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences”.

The accusation, which DHS has also recently leveled against a member of Congress and a high-profile union leader, have sparked consternation, particularly as videos of the incidents did not show the officials attacking officers and instead captured officers’

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Fans on a walk.

As Richard Dawkins said about religion “You’re only a Christian because you were born in America. Had you been born in Israel you’d be a Jew, in India a Hindu or in Iran, a Muslim”

When you only know your country as a theocracy, you grow to think theocracy is normal, just as Brits accept an expensive monarchy and Americans a dysfunctional electoral system.

Iran is only a theocracy because the British feared losing their oil fields when Iran’s nascent democracy proposed nationalisation of its resources. Britain, aided by the USA, overthrew the Iranian attempt at democracy and reimposed the brutal Palavi family. That the only way … Read the rest

“Oh but you mustn’t talk about that” – they say, about the very things we have to talk about.

Horrible women-hating coercive demanding religions for instance. Which religion does that conjure up? Shhhhhhhhhh – it doesn’t do to say so.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has been accused of conducting secretive talks to establish a government-wide definition of Islamophobia that critics say could hamper discussions about grooming gangs.

Don’t. We’re allowed to hate religions. Islam is a harsh system of control of humans, triply harsh toward women and not too fond of atheists or Jews. We’re allowed to criticize it and we’re allowed to resist it.

The MP has established a working group to develop the definition, but Conservative

Theocracy: right side of history or no?

Khamenei fans on a walk in London today to tell people that they're on the "right side of history". Do they mean the far right side of history? pic.twitter.com/0qjQQtIL6S

— Stop The Hate UK (@StopTheHate_UK) June 21, 2025

Mullahs in charge, all women in public wrapped in bandages. What’s not to like? … Read the rest

Victoria Smith starts with a wry joke.

My youngest son has audio versions of all of the Harry Potter books. Given the public pronouncements of a certain artist, I’ve started to find this problematic. True, one can separate the art from the creator, but sometimes the latter’s hateful beliefs infect the former. This is the case when actor Stephen Fry reads the works of brilliant, principled writer J.K. Rowling.

Gotcha! It’s not JKR who is “problematic”; it’s the Problematic-sniffing Policers of Discourse who are problemyish.

There’s something in the way he voices each female character, from Hermoine Grainger to Dolores Umbridge, which reeks of misogyny. The way to sound like a woman, in Fry’s view, is to make yourself

The New Republic underlines the obvious, which is that Trump will say anything and do anything to get his way and we can’t stop him unless we stop him, which we’re obviously not doing.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump scored a temporary victory after an appeals court ruled that he can continue deploying the National Guard as part of his watch-me-play-fascist-on-TV response to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. The decision accepted Trump’s premise that conditions in L.A. permit him to take control of the guard—but it rejected his claim that such decisions should be entirely unreviewable by courts.

That latter part of the ruling is important. It’s potentially something of an obstacle to his ongoing effort to assume quasi-dictatorial

Oliver Brown on Simone Biles and her show of contempt for women:

For Biles, the provocation, if you could call it that, was Gaines’ highlighting of the fact that a Minnesota girls’ softball team won a state title this month despite their dominant pitcher being male. “Your star player is a boy,” she said, prompting Biles, until that point a mute figure in the ferocious battle to compel sports to respect the reality of sex, to go off the deep end.

“You’re truly sick,” she raged at Gaines, who was infamously denied a United States collegiate trophy in 2022 by transgender opponent Lia Thomas. “Straight-up sore loser. You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to

Originally a comment by Arcadia on Stephen Fry is a rat.

This bit is the bit that genuinely infuriates me:

‘Sir Stephen said: “She has been radicalised, I fear, and it may be she has been radicalised by terfs, but also by the vitriol that is thrown at her. It is unhelpful and only hardens her and will only continue to harden her, I am afraid. I am not saying that she [should] not be called out when she says things that are really cruel, wrong and mocking. She seems to be a lost cause for us.”’

This double standard. This quote makes clear he knows full well what Rowling has been subjected to, and he knows it constitutes … Read the rest

Laura Webster, the editor of a newspaper called The National is annoyed that JK Rowling called the paper “anti-woman.”

She made this claim because we ran an article, and have run many articles previously, describing groups like Sex Matters as “anti-trans”.

I would like to take the opportunity to defend this newspaper against Rowling’s frankly ridiculous description, and explain why “anti-trans” is indeed suitable language for these activists. 

In the social copy for the article, we stated: “An anti-trans campaign group is threatening further legal action against the Scottish Government, saying ministers are failing to implement the recent Supreme Court judgment on biological sex in equalities law.”

On Wednesday night, Rowling tweeted: “For Women Scotland is a feminist campaigning

Vance is going to Los Angeles to rub their noses in it.

The vice-president will meet with law enforcement and military leadership deployed by Donald Trump in the city to help control violent protests.

“Vice-president JD Vance will travel to Los Angeles, California, where he will tour a multi-agency federal joint operations centre, a federal mobile command centre, meet with leadership and Marines, and deliver brief remarks,” according to a readout.

The visit risks inflaming the already tense relationship between Gavin Newsom, the state’s governor, and the White House.

It doesn’t so much risk inflaming it as make a point of inflaming it.

An appeals court on Thursday allowed Mr Trump to keep control of National Guard troops he

This is such a key point for the resistance to trans ideology and blurghy thinking generally.

“Hallmark soundtrack” is an excellent label for it.

I hate it, not in a calm all in the head way but viscerally – I hate slushy elevated pompous look at me wording the way I hate fat buzzing flies anywhere near me, or noisy crowded shouty spaces, or cigarette smoke. I hate self-conscious posturing look at me writing. I hate the substitution of manipulative drool for actual arguments and reasons. And of course trans ideology is riddled with it, for the obvious reason that it has nothing else.

Beware the Hallmark Effect.… Read the rest

Extras for everyone except women. Women are the privileged class you know. Bitches and Karens all of them.

An amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that would introduce tougher sentences for hate crimes committed against LGBT people and people with disabilities is being backed by East Thanet MP Polly Billington.

The new law, if passed by MPs, would make serious crimes motivated by prejudice against anyone because of their disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity “aggravated” offenses – as is currently the case for hate crimes motivated by race or religion. Aggravated offenses carry tougher sentences for perpetrators.

Got that?

Disability, sexual orientation, genner idenniny, race, religion.

But not sex. No extras for women: women don’t need extras … Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on Break everything.

As for how [anti-vaxxers] can live with themselves, they are sure they are doing the opposite of killing people. They believe they are saving people. (I don’t think that’s the case with Trump; I think he doesn’t think at all, and doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself.)

I met a lot of anti-vaxxers in the years I was part of the environmental science program in my doctoral program. For the most part, they were the youngsters, those born after we managed to solve so many problems of diseases. They had been raised on a media drumbeat of the evils of big Pharma, big Medicine, and science denialism, but they … Read the rest

The BBC does a surprisingly good job of letting Martina Navratilova state her views on trans ideology without interrupting to throw rocks at her. The article is about her views on Trump (briefly: not what she emigrated to the US for).

There is, however, one extremely divisive subject on which she has previously said she agrees with President Trump – transgender women’s participation in sport. Navratilova is firm in her belief that the inclusion of trans women in women’s tennis is “wrong”.

She says she doesn’t agree with current World Tennis Association (WTA) rules, which state transgender women can participate in women’s games if they provide a written and signed declaration that they are female or non-binary, that their testosterone