The language of this dispute is so corrupted and twisted and inside-out that reporting on it is inevitably a tangle of weeds and thorns. The Telegraph does not escape this trap.

The Liberal Democrats are at war over trans rights after the leadership defied its members and banned biological men from taking women’s posts in the party.

But what are trans rights? Who says? What happens when they cancel the rights of other sets of people? Specifically, the rights of half the population? How do we know the purported rights are rights at all?

On Tuesday, the party banned trans women from taking women’s positions following the Supreme Court’s ruling on biological sex.

Because trans women are men. Men don’t have any right to take women’s positions.

The party’s LGBT+ group condemned the decision as “trans-exclusionary” and an “attack” on one of the country’s most marginalised groups.

Is it a group at all? Who says? What are the criteria? In what sense is it marginalized? Is it more marginalized than women? Who says? What are the criteria?

In other words this stale sloganeering is based on a slew of unexamined assumptions. All those assumptions are bullshit. Let’s delete and start over.

The issue prompted a row at September’s party conference after the group Liberal Voice for Women tried to call a vote to change to party rules that would bring the Lib Dems in line with the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman.

However, delegates voted not to even debate on the motion, indicating they were happy with the rules as they were.

The original rules allowed those who “self-identify as women” to stand for party posts set aside for women, which gender-critical activists said diluted the chance that biological women could reach the top of the party.

Because of course it does. If you let some men stand for party posts set aside for women then there are fewer party posts set aside for women. That’s how that works. If you replace some peaches with bananas, then there are fewer peaches.

After receiving legal advice, the party published the new rules on Tuesday, stating that quotas would be applied to people according to their sex at birth, not with their preferred gender identity.

…

The new rules sparked anger among members of the group LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, writing on X that they “condemn our party’s decision to base internal gender quotas on sex assigned at birth”. It said: “This trans-exclusionary decision is an attack on one of the most vulnerable groups in our society.”

Pampered. The word you’re looking for is “pampered”. Men who pretend to be women are the most pampered group in our society.

The Lib Dems said its rules would also change to ensure that at least one trans person should sit on all its larger committees.

A spokeswoman for Liberal Voice for Women said: “It is good to see the party has taken on board legal advice and is now changing its quotas following the Supreme Court ruling to ensure quotas for women are reserved for women.

“However, we are concerned that the new quota guarantees those with a trans identity at least one place on every committee over 10 people, despite the fact trans people are only 0.5 per cent of the population, alongside the fact there is no evidence they are under-represented on Lib Dem committees.”

Ahhhh but you see they are The Most Marginalised. It says so right here.

Sinister

Two federal prosecutors were informed Wednesday that they will be put on leave after filing a legal brief that described the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as being carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,” sources familiar with their removals told ABC News. 

So they were put on leave because they filed the brief?

The two prosecutors, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, were locked out of their government devices and informed Wednesday morning they will be placed on leave, just hours after they filed a sentencing memorandum in the case of Taylor Taranto, the sources said.  

Were they told why? Were they told it was because they filed the brief?

It’s unclear if Valdivia or White were given a reason for their suspensions, though the moves come following months of turmoil in the Washington, D.C., U.S. attorney’s office where multiple career prosecutors faced removals or demotions related to their involvement in prosecuting the more than 1,500 defendants charged in connection with the Capitol attack. 

Yes, how dare anyone try to prosecute attempts to overthrow an election by violent means.

Down down down the road we go.

Police Scotland ignore the criminal and charge his victim with a crime. You’ll never guess which party is a man and which is a woman.

Parliamentary police officers have ordered a director of For Women Scotland to attend a police station to face vandalism charges over a broken brolly after a complaint by a trans activist.

Susan Smith, one third of the feminist group who took the Scottish Government to the Supreme Court on the definition of a woman and won, has been accused of minor damage to an umbrella at a rally outside the Scottish parliament last month.

But the incident, which could result in Mrs Smith, 54, appearing in a criminal court, has provoked fury and Police Scotland have been accused of ‘remaining under the spell of the SNP’s trans ideology’.

How does Police Scotland live with itself? Minor damage to a fucking umbrella? Which he was using as a shield and weapon in his noisy “protest” of women defending their rights? Why not instead charge him with brandishing a weapon in a woman’s face?

Tom Harlow, who counter-protests dozens of women’s events by blasting music to drown out feminists, has claimed Mrs Smith broke his rainbow-coloured golf brolly after she asked him to turn his music system’s sound down.

Yet both video and still pictures of their 20-second interaction at the Women Won’t Wait event, where high profile feminists including Tracey Edwards, Joanna Cherry, KC, and MSPs Pam Gosal and Ash Regan spoke out, do not appear to reveal any damage.

Well, it was spiritual damage. The umbrella was offended. Its feelings were hurt. It was terrorized by the cruel evil woman refusing to abandon women’s rights.

Harlow, a drag artist and stripper who performs as Cabaret Against The Hate Speech has received funding from the Scottish Government’s quango Creative Scotland. He regularly turns up at events to counter protest at women by blasting music.

He makes a habit of literally drowning out women’s voices, of literally preventing women from having a say, and the cops are charging a woman with damaging his fucking UMBRELLA. The one he was pushing in her face.

It is unclear whether Harlow, whose real name is Thomas Michael Moncrieff Carlin, had permission to counter-protest the Women Won’t Wait event but it is understood that dozens of women there made noise complaints.

During the 90 minute rally, Harlow sat on a folding chair next to his music system as two police officers stood close by. One woman at the event said: ‘Susan literally walked over smiling and asked him politely to turn the music down and he put up his umbrella in her face. She moved around to try and talk to him and he blocked her face again with the brolly.

…

The Mail understands that Mrs Smith will refuse the offer of a warning by police next week and has been told that will mean she will be charged with vandalism.

She could also face bail conditions that may include banning her from Holyrood, the scene of the alleged offence.

She will but he won’t. He’s the aggressor, she’s the target, and the cops are punishing her. It’s way beyond parody at this point.

Cracking down on the crackdown.

U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, the face of “Operation Midway Blitz” cracking down on illegal immigration, must report daily to a federal judge after reports of combative enforcement, including using tear gas.

I don’t think “combative” is the right word. It’s what you say when someone is getting a little too intense when arguing over a newspaper headline or similar. I think the word should be “aggressive” or “violent”. If we’re talking about tear gas versus shouting, we need a less emollient word than “combative.”

Bovino appeared Tuesday for a tense hearing before U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in downtown Chicago. She questioned him about reports of aggressive immigration enforcement and the federal agents’ treatment of protesters, journalists and even children during the ongoing “immigration blitz.”

There you go. Aggressive. Scratch “combative”.

The hearing was part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by local media organizations alleging that federal agents have violated prior court orders restricting their use of force. Those orders forbid [ban] agents from using tear gas or “riot control” weapons without giving two warnings and from deploying them against people who pose no immediate threat.

Well where’s the fun in that?

“They don’t have to like what you’re doing. And that’s OK. That’s what democracy is,” Ellis said during the hearing, referring to protesters or others who might be voicing opposition to federal agents on the ground. “They can say they don’t like what you’re doing, that they don’t like how you’re enforcing the laws, that they wish you would leave Chicago and take the agents with you. They can say that, and that’s fine. But they can’t get teargassed for it.”

You know why? Because it’s not against the law, that’s why. We’re allowed to talk back.

[T]he tone was serious as Ellis read anecdotes aloud from reports that federal agents had used tear gas in Chicago neighborhoods during Halloween festivities. “Kids were tear gassed on their way to celebrate Halloween,” the judge said, referring to an incident in the Old Irving Park neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. “Those kids were dressed up in their Halloween costumes. You can imagine, their sense of safety was shattered.”

Yes but they were insurgents. They were disloyal. They were Antifa. They were anti-Trump. It’s got to stop!

The Guardian words this so carefully, and dishonestly.

At least 11 states and two territories are capitulating to a recent demand from the Trump administration to strip references to gender identity and the existence of transgender and non-binary people from a federal sex education program, officials confirmed to the Guardian.

…

Prep aims to educate adolescents on healthy relationships and how to prevent pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted infections. In April, the Trump administration demanded all states and territories that receive money for Prep to send a copy of their curriculum to HHS and its agency the Administration for Children and Families for a “medical accuracy review”.

Four months later, the administration sent letters to 46 states and territories informing them that, in the course of the review, it discovered “content in the curricula and other program materials that fall outside of the scope of Prep’s authorizing statute”. Specifically, the administration said it had uncovered evidence of “gender ideology”, the rightwing shorthand for suggestions that gender is a fluid social construct and that trans and non-binary people exist.

Except that the issue is not “suggestions” that gender is fluid. The issue is the insistence that sex can be swapped. There’s quite a yawning gap between those two claims, a gap filled with shouting angry “activists” trying to force women to agree that men are women if they say they are.

The Trump administration is of course not the ideal set of people to take on this fight, but the Democrats refuse to take it on at all. Women are between a rock and a hard place.

The Guardian contacted every state, as well as most territories, that received letters from the Trump administration. Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming said they would remove the references or had done so already. The US Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands, two territories, said the same.

Two other states, Alabama and South Dakota, said their Prep curricula never included the terminology referenced in the Trump administration’s letters.

Collectively, these states are home to more than 120,000 trans people between the ages of 13 and 17, according to estimates by the Williams Institute, a department of the UCLA School of Law.

Because trans ideology is a popular fad, but that is not a reason to encourage teenagers to think it’s based in reality. If 120,000 kids between 13 and 17 believe they can change sex then that’s a tragedy, but it’s not a reason to tell them they’re right to think so.

“If our goal is to support youth and give them a safe space, I’m not sure why we are stomping on the most vulnerable youth in the population,” said Cindi Huss, who leads Rise, an organization that provides sex education in Tennessee.

Define “safe space.” Is it a space where teenagers are encouraged to think they’re in the wrong body? Define “stomping on.” Is it telling teenagers they’re in their own bodies? Define “most vulnerable.” Are kids who think they’re trans automatically and always more vulnerable than kids who are shy or dorky or poor or depressed or dealing with alcoholic parents?

It remains true that the Trump people are the wrong ones to deal with it though.

Lordy how people give themselves away.

What ever happened to due process?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that the U.S. military has carried out three strikes in the eastern Pacific Ocean against boats accused of carrying drugs, killing 14 people and leaving one survivor.

This was the first time multiple strikes were announced in a single day. Carried out Monday, the strikes mark a continued escalation in the pace of the attacks in South American waters, which began in early September and had been spaced weeks apart.

…

Hegseth said “the four vessels were known by our intelligence apparatus, transiting along known narco-trafficking routes, and carrying narcotics.”

The Trump administration has shown no evidence to support its claims about the boats, their connection to drug cartels, or the even the identity of the people killed in these strikes.

The death toll from the 13 disclosed strikes since early September now stands at at least 57 people.

Never forget: Trump is the guy who campaigned for the execution of the Central Park Five, who didn’t do it. Trump believes in execution first and questions later.

Wat?

And if we’re “grooming” what is it that people like Jonathan Willougby are doing? Surely urging credulous teenagers and young adults to mutilate themselves in order to pretend to be the other sex is more like grooming than not doing that is.

Oh well. Brush your hair, all of you.

Ah yes, why don’t women who lose athletic competitions to men just try harder?

What next, badges with “no feminists” or “no women” in shops? Are we doing this all over again?

Not El Paso this time, but Dundee.

A Crieff  designer claims she was ordered to leave Dundee’s Hobbycraft shop after a gender rights row over a staff member’s “no terfs” badge.

Rebekah Chapman, 33, confronted the employee over the “unpleasant” slogan on Sunday in the Kingsway West Retail Park branch.

The badge also said “no Tories”.

Well, you know, maybe the employee was bringing her/his whole self to work.

I hate it when people do that. I don’t want your whole self, any more than you want mine.

What we want in brief utilitarian public interactions is basic politeness and/or friendliness, along with competence at the task in question. What we don’t want is to be informed of the other person’s political views.

News from the fens:

Three Cambridge University students have today launched the Cambridge University Society of Women (CUSW) with the ambition to “advocate for and raise awareness of women’s sex-based issues across the political spectrum and around the world, as well as provide a single-sex environment for women to discuss the issues that concern us most as women in the absence of men”

The CUSW’s constitution defines women as “adult human beings belonging to the female sex class”. In doing so, the founders – Thea Sewell, Maeve Halligan and Serena Worley (pictured) – believe they are the only student society at Cambridge University serving the interests and needs of biological women and biological women only.

Yes!! Let’s hope they’re the first of many.

The driving force behind the CUSW is 22 year old Maeve Halligan. Maeve is at Lucy Cavendish College, studying for an MPhil after graduating from Bristol University earlier this year with a first in French and Russian. Maeve has never been persuaded by gender ideology, but was shocked at the extent to which it saturated her university experience.

“The humanities section of universities are unequivocally captured by this stuff. It’s everything. It’s everywhere. I remember day one, I turn up and I’m handed a rainbow lanyard. It’s that casual. It’s on every noticeboard – something like: Are you feeling gender distress? Or posters of trans flags with slogans saying: My existence is not a threat. What are you scared of?“

Maeve’s views are straightforward: “I see the trans agenda as a form of propaganda and I know propaganda when I see it. The flags everywhere. The pronoun badges. Transgender ideology is the most regressive, homophobic, sexist, crucially misogynistic thing to exist, in a very, very long time.”

Or ever, really. It’s sui generis. The parody-level hijacking of feminism couldn’t exist without feminism, and feminism has been mainstream for only a few decades.

The CUSW’s Declaration of Purpose and Intent states an aim to challenge: “the predominant narratives surrounding sex and gender at our university. We want to represent and discuss how the idea of biological sex being changeable, arbitrary, exclusionary or ‘falsely assigned’ is regressive and directly erodes women’s sex-based rights. In doing so, we aim to open up conversation surrounding numerous other ongoing social and political debates, especially those that pertain to women.”

I love them already.

Women’s Rights Network reports:

BREAKING: Word reaches us that @Cambridge_Uni has ordered its sports clubs to comply with national sports governing body rules that protect the female category.

In September, we highlighted the grossly unfair rules that allowed male rowers to compete in university college boat crews – in breach of the Equality Act 2010. In one egregious example, a town boat club affiliated to @BritishRowing allowed student clubs to include males in their female boats – against British Rowing rules.

We understand that sports clubs were told in no uncertain terms that if they continued to flout the law the university could dissolve the club and would not stand by any officers of clubs that might be on the receiving end of legal action.

Last week, at an Extraordinary General Meeting of the Cambridge University College Boat Clubs there was a vote on whether to comply with the law.

According to one report: ‘They were informed by the University that there was a credible threat that they would be sued by well-funded pressure groups if they didn’t acquiesce to BR guidelines, and the university made clear they would not protect them legally.’

The vote to comply with the law and British Rowing rules was passed. Cue much outrage in the boat clubs along the Cam.

‘Anger is very much justified here,’ says one post on the Rowbridge Reborn FB group. ‘But I think the anger should be directed at the loathsome bigots – who, over the summer, began to dox transgender athletes at Cambridge with their photos and full details on their “women’s rights” forums.’

Here at Loathsome Bigot HQ we’d like to remind all sports clubs that flouting the law does have consequences. Female student rowers have lost on places in university college crews, and even places in the Boat Race squad, for over a decade. The grown-ups have finally stepped in. The law is there to protect women and girls. And that is why we do what we do.

Over at The Other Place, @UniofOxford college boat clubs still have rules written in 2019 that allow males to self-identify into women’s boats. Perhaps it’s time for Oxford University to follow Cambridge and lay down the law?

Well done Cambridge!

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Any regrets?

To the extent that there is a causal pathway from “GC” to “MAGA”, it’s making people like Linehan so angry about the excesses of gender ideology that they no longer care who their bedfellows are

That’s an interesting point. Bedfellows is a lovely, poetic word for compatriots. I think there’s a deep-down, evolved need in most of us to situate ourselves within a tribe — within a safe, comfortable, familiar community of like-minded individuals, who have each others’ backs when we’re feeling besieged by a common enemy. In fact, that feels close to perhaps the biggest insight I’ve ever felt in my whole life: my whopping Eureka! moment. After several years working, writing, podcasting, grinding, ruminating — FULMINATING! — against genderwoo, trying to make sense of something so mystifying, I feel like I’m circling towards a kind of Grand Theory of Everyting That’s Wrong With the World, or an answer to the universal question, Why Does Irrationality Persist All the Time Within our Big Dumb Species? And it involves tribalism and that feeling of comfort that some people crave so much more deeply than others…

I mean, you could very well argue I was scratching at this itch long before gender became the focus of my attention: it was a fascination with religiosity in a broad, philosophical sense that initially captivated me and hooked me on critical-thinking blogs like B&W. I’m sure that’s the same with many other B&W regulars: we came here before gender; we came here because critical thinking.

Given the Jesus-based homophobia and misogyny faced by me and my single-parent feminist mother in my formative years, there’s no mystery where my interests in atheism, rationalism, and women’s rights came from. And that eventually led to a Centre For Inquiry membership, and then a particular fascination with the bizarre little demimonde of Scientology (as an observer, not a member, of course!). The Scientologists are so extreme, and so uniform in their extremity — and some of them seem otherwise so rational when you get them talking about subjects other than the cult… it’s like a perfect little petri dish for testing ideas about cult-think. They’re little rats in a maze, and the poor fools don’t even know it.

The disparate strands of my various fascinations only started really coming together and converging on the trans phenomenon after I divorced my ex and took a job at a gay bar in middle age. Before that stabilizing relationship, I was a ragamuffin gay-village street kid. It was afterwards, coming back to the subculture I’d grown up in, and seeing how culty it had become while I was away for a decade — while I spent a decade as a couch-bound, middle-class, 9-to-5 normie — that I started making shocking connections between the Southern Baptist evangelical family that had left me behind, the kooky Scientologists I prodded at online, and my immediate, real-world circle of friends and colleagues.

Up until then, I genuinely thought that us hip, sophisticated, arty (!), cosmopolitan folk were above such tribal irrationality.

But it turns out the Big City and its urbane ways is just another tribe, just another cultural comfort blanket, with rules, rituals, a pecking order, and everything else that tribal membership entails. The big-city tribe’s ideas and core values are generally more cerebral — I mean that literally, as in they’re ideas that rely on the processing fuctions that the prefrontal cerebral cortex handles, which is to say, they’re thinky and refined, compared to Red State-world’s aggressively unthinky and gut-level, knee-jerk values.

But the problem with humans is that more cerebral doesn’t mean more true. Sometimes knee-jerk feelings aren’t dumb: sometimes they point us to tried-and-true common sense. And sometimes deep thoughts aren’t smart: sometimes they lead us to overthinking: we see mirages because of overanalysis and neurosis. (Doesn’t trans fit that description so well?)

Humans occupy the material world — as real as rocks, as concrete as concrete; rawly physical — as well as the abstract, brainy web of ideas shared between us, in that invisible mesh network that connects our cerebral cortexes together into shared cultural domains. These virtual domains of shared experience and values — these tribal frameworks for our collective existence — feel just as real as the actual material world to people. It takes tremendous amounts of critical self-evaluation to parse the difference between the actual material world and the abstract, intellectual one.

But they’re both still real in the sense that they’re equally influential to the core of the human experience. We live simultaneously in both worlds, and our core instincts don’t distinguish between them, no matter how hard our highfalutin grey matter tries to say otherwise.

And frankly, both worlds are “demon-haunted”, to borrow Carl Sagan’s phrase — and to mildly rebut it. Both worlds are candles in each others’ darks. That’s the mess of the trans movement: it’s an atypical example of the demons haunting the sophisticated grey matter instead of the primitive amygdala. It’s an example of gut instinct being right and so-called “higher thought” being wrong: sex IS deeply ingrained, instinctually understood, readily observed, and it fucking matters to everyone, and we’re not demons for not trying to “think our way out of” the existence of sex.

But I digress. Back to Graham and the path from GC to MAGA, or MAGA-adjacent. Bedfellows.

This is all humans trying to make sense of our lives, and to find stability and comfort. It’s that all the way down. We need tribes to feel safe. Some of us more than others. When the heat gets hot, people’s deep, low-down, instinctual priorities change. It’s not a great mystery to me why it happens anymore. Just like it’s not a great mystery to me anymore why people become Scientologists. I marvelled and scratched at that question for years, but now I kinda get it. It’s my Eureka, that I mentioned earlier. I can finally see — and grasp — what’s up.

Graham and I have no doubt diverged in our political affiliations and worldviews, but that doesn’t even a little bit change my respect and admiration for Graham.

I see my friend as someone who’s looked at his personal need for tribal affinity and safety and taken actions that make him feel safest in that regard — away from the “progressives” who’ve ruthlessly attacked him. In fact, I can see how I must look utterly bizarre to some of my GC colleagues: the fact that I still identify as a liberal even though virtually all lefties have thoroughly rejected me, cancelled me, attacked me, and all but left me for dead! Am I some kind of self-hating masochist to still associate with lefties/progressives/liberals (whatever you want to call them)? That’s not an unreasonable question, at all. There are two kinds of people who emerge when faced with such a dilemma: my kind and Graham’s kind. We’re still two of a kind — erstwhile or ostensible liberals in crisis — but we’re different kinds, and this is how: Most people subconsciously associate their political positions with finding the best way to meet their personal needs and to feed their personal instincts. That’s Graham’s life path — and it’s perfectly human. Other people (such as me) associate our political positions with external ideas, and we separate ourselves and our needs from them completely. One path says, if this political worldview isn’t working for me, I should change paths. These people internalize the problem. Other people (my kind) externalize the problem: it can’t be me; it must be the system malfunctioning.

The irony is, both these worldviews have their merits. In fact, in a stable, normal world, in Graham’s worldview, it starts out with humility: the kernel of it says that *he himself* must have got something wrong, and it builds from there. That’s respectable!

This is all just a roundabout, elaborate way of showing you that if you break down the lefty position, right down to its framework, you can build it right back up to a sympathetic framework that has opposite conclusions.

MAGA and TWAW really are tremendously alike. And that’s a valuable thing to understand: it offers the possibility of hope and reconciliation.

xoxoxo

Here we go again.

Two US House Republicans are pushing the federal justice department to investigate the path to citizenship of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate favored to win the 4 November election for New York City mayor.

Congressman Randy Fine of Florida and Andy Ogles of Tennessee – both staunch proponents of Donald Trump’s presidential administration – have been leading the push, which has been condemned by Democratic officials and Muslim civil rights groups as “racist and anti-Muslim”.

Again, as with trans ideology, the discourse carefully obscures the fact that Islam has content, and the content is not necessarily entirely benign. Yes it can be merely, or partially, racism or fear of the Other or just plain old-style My Religion is Better Than Yours that inspires hostility to Islam, but the fact remains that the content is what it is. It is, shall we say, not benevolent towards women, or Jews, or infidels, or apostates.

People, especially people of The Media and political types, frame religions as cuddly and merely personal, like red hair or a fondness for tikka masala. That makes everything easier, but it has its downsides. Ignoring Islam’s propensity to temper tantrums is a major downside.

“I think Islamophobia is something that is endemic to politics across this country,” Mamdani added in the interview with MSNBC. “And we have seen it normalized. We have seen it accepted.”

Racists and Trumpies do love to hate on Muslims and Islam, it’s true, but more than one thing can be true, and another thing that’s true here is that Islam is not 100% benign. Neither are Xianity and Judaism, but Islam does stand out for things like throwing gay men off roofs and stoning women to death.

Well, bitches, if you don’t like it you can work from home.

The BBC is allowing staff to work from home if they have concerns about the broadcaster’s policy allowing biological men to use women’s lavatories.

…

In its review of the policy the BBC suggests that, although there are “self-contained facilities or mixed-sex toilets” at most of its sites, staff who have “concerns” may be able to work from home as a solution, while it awaits Government guidance following the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of sex in the Equality Act.

The BBC is so confused. Mixed-sex toilets are the problem, not the solution. The “concerns” women have are about dealing with men in the toilets.

In April, the Supreme Court said in a landmark ruling that the Equality Act refers to biological sex, not self-identified gender.

Yet the BBC admits it is still letting biological men use women’s lavatories, changing facilities and showers. The corporation said it will only change its policies once the Government has issued guidance on the decision, despite calls from Sir Keir Starmer urging public bodies to implement the changes “as soon as possible”.

Well yes but they’re waiting for the government, not Starmer. Totally reasonable, not at all evasive or hostile or childish.

Oh really. Is that true?

The trouble is, the two parties are not symmetrical. Men who want access to women’s spaces want the access in order to dominate or rape. Women want access to men’s institutions in order to have equality. The motivations are radically different. Women are locked out of men’s institutions because of entrenched sexist and misogynist attitudes. Men are locked out of women’s physical spaces for safety reasons.

In short women in this dispute are not the plantation owners. Not even slightly.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Strange man.

“I believe, in the next couple of decades, there will be millions of people living in space. That’s how fast this is going to accelerate,” he said.

There’s a small problem with this. We don’t know how to live in space. I believe it was from someone posting here on B&W that I learned of the book A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith. Their conclusion? Not soon, not likely. The problem? It’s not only the Rocket Science, it’s the Us Science.

A short list of things we don’t know about (not all from the book, and in no particular order):

Part 1) Rocket science

How to build Really Big Things in space.

How to build Really Big Things that Spin in space.

How to build Really Big Things on moons and planets.

How to build large scale, long term closed loop systems.

How to mine and process materials in space

Part 2) Us science

Sex in space.

Conception, gestation and birth in space.

Growth and maturation in space.

How to grow lots of food in space (see “closed loop system” above).

How to build a community/society/polity in space.

What happens when the Company Town controls the air you breathe?

Etc.

According to Google, the most people launched into space on one flight was 8; and the largest number ofhumans in space at one time up to now has been 19. Millions in 20 years? No. Do we really want that many rockets built* and launched in that period of time? Fuck no.

And what exactly are a million people going to do in space? Is there a need for that many people to go into space? Fragile space stations, and Lunar or Martian colonies are never going to be insurance policies against human extinction (let alone biospheric extinction). As far as we’re concerned, Earth is it. The chances of self-sustaining, off-Earth human settlements are remote. They will always be more vulnerable than Earth. If planetary disaster did strike, rendering Earth uninhabitable, such colonies would be, at best, lifeboats with no one to rescue them.

Questions of time frame and material feasability aside, do we really want corporations or individuals claiming for themselves a Manifest Destiny in space, claiming territories to which they have no right, squandering resources they can buy, but which the planet cannot afford? Are the communitis/societies/polities they dream of spawning going to be bastions of freedom and liberty, when there’s always going to be someone able to pull the plug, or vent the atmosphere? How do we live off the Earth when we haven’t learned (or have forgotten how) to live in it and on it?

*Sure, some will be reusable, or partly so, but you’re going to need a huge fleet, which will be a huge drain on resources, and a huge source of pollution from both construction and launch. Musk’s Starship, which will supposedly carry up to 100 people at once, would require 10,000 launches to loft 1,000,000 people into space. Since 1957, in the total history of space flight, the total number of orbital launches of all kinds, by all nations and companies has been about 7,300. The number of space launches with humans aboard (which also includes suborbital flights)? About 400.

Trump seems to think tariffs are like spankings or being sent to your room without dessert.

Trump has said he is increasing tariffs on goods imported from Canada after the province of Ontario aired an anti-tariff advertisement featuring former President Ronald Reagan. In a post on social media on Saturday, Trump called the advert a “fraud” and lashed out at Canadian officials for not removing it ahead of the World Series baseball championship.

“Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now,” he wrote.

But that’s not what tariffs are for. They’re not punishments for being naughty. They’re really not punishments for irritating the bossy guy.

The advert, which was sponsored by the Ontario government, quotes former US President Ronald Reagan, a Republican and icon of US conservatism, saying tariffs “hurt every American”. The video takes excerpts from a 1987 national radio address that focused on foreign trade.

The Ronald Reagan Foundation, which is charged with preserving the former president’s legacy, had criticised the advert for using “selective” audio and video and said it misrepresented Reagan’s address. It also said the Ontario government had not sought permission to use it.

Does it need permission? Is the address not public domain? If not why not?

Fiyaz Mughal on the disaster of communniny thinking:

Over half a decade of working with the Home Office on countering extremism, I saw it for myself, time and time again: a civil service culture that instinctively resists scrutiny of anything involving religion or ethnicity.

The moment you even suggest that the ethnicity or faith of perpetrators might be one factor among many worth examining, certain civil servants recoil. They tell you that looking into it might “inflame community tensions”, or “increase hate crimes against Muslims” or “cause policing issues”.

He doesn’t in fact actually mean religion or ethnicity as such, he means specifically that one religion, the one he names. I don’t think UK civil servants freak out much when the subject is Anglicanism.

These arguments become a convenient way to close down honest discussion. That’s the exact approach that now appears to be dominating the Government’s inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, and I worry it means that the state will never truly tackle the underlying issues.

Purported “Islamophobia” is right up there with purported “transphobia” for ignoring and silencing dissenters.

I’ve spent much of my working life engaging various government departments on issues of hate crime, community cohesion and extremism. In 2012 I set up Tell Mama, an organisation which monitors anti-Muslim hate and supports victims.

This meant countless meetings with the Home Office to highlight groups whose values and world view were at direct odds with the values of our nation; groups who were willing to inflame division and tensions through their actions.

In other words groups who were motivating “Islamophobia” rather than preventing it.

I was alarmed to discover that Prevent coordinators, the people tasked with countering extremism, were regularly engaging with what I saw as extremist groups.

On countless occasions I put it to the civil servants in charge of counter-extremism that it seemed deeply antithetical to the cause of counter-extremism to engage with groups who believed in Sharia marriage [and] polygamy and openly attacked Muslims who engaged with Jews…

When I raised it, though, the response was a wall of polite obstruction. Each local authority, I was told, makes its own decisions. There might be legal risks in naming these organisations. Some civil servants insisted these were simply “legitimate Muslim groups” who should be included in community engagement, as though their form of Islamic interpretations were “normative” Islam.

It was a masterclass in bureaucratic resistance. And behind every excuse was an ideology: a belief that acknowledging the problem might undermine social cohesion. 

Which is so interesting, because what about the fact that not acknowledging the problem might undermine soshul koheezhun? Why is social cohesion based on nodding happily at energetic subordination of women while ignoring the misery of those subordinated women? It’s frat-boy social cohesion, not the kind that sees women and girls as actual people.

The problem as I see it goes all the way back to Gordon Brown’s government. That period, post-Blair, was when the themes of social cohesion and community harmony became dominant within government. The old Department for Communities and Local Government (now MHCLG) grew out of that thinking, and over time it embedded a particular type of civil servant – people whose entire careers have been shaped by what I call “kumbaya politics”. By that I mean the kind of world view where everyone sits around holding hands, pretending that the world is fine and that we must never look too closely at uncomfortable realities for fear of upsetting someone.

Nowhere is that more entrenched than in the MHCLG. Within that department, there’s a powerful narrative that says: anything which risks making one community look bad must be resisted.

But, again, some communninies more than others. Much more than others. In particular, of course, the massive communiny that is female people is never as coddled and protected and defended as the Moosslimm communinny, and of course the atheist communniny and the Jewish communniny are also disdained.

And it’s not just ideology – it’s also groupthink. Over the years, a small circle of advisers from within Muslim communities have come to dominate this space. Many are closely aligned with the Labour Party, and they sing the same tune: that Islamophobia is the overriding issue facing Muslims, that Islamism should not be discussed, and that grooming has nothing whatsoever to do with culture or faith. I have worked for 25 years fighting anti-Muslim hatred and measuring its rise – I know the reality of that threat, but I also know that this narrow narrative has suffocated all other perspectives.

The problem here is that it’s of the nature of religions to be groupthink. That’s what religions are.

So bright.

Jeff Bezos says the future is so bright, he “doesn’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now.” Speaking at Italian Tech Week 2025 earlier this month with Ferrari and Stellantis chair John Elkann, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder laid out a plan to launch humanity into orbit — literally.

I wonder if being a billionaire makes it difficult for him to see how other people can be discouraged. Several of those people are not billionaires. Several people have no money at all. Several people have health issues. Several people have problems of various kinds, which can lead to being discouraged.

The conversation started on Earth but didn’t stay there long. Bezos dove headfirst into space — predicting colonies, building data centers off-world, and using the moon as a gas station. “I believe, in the next couple of decades, there will be millions of people living in space. That’s how fast this is going to accelerate,” he said.

And that’s a reason not to be discouraged???

Living in space would be horrible.

And seriously. Twenty years from now there will be millions of people living in space?

Come on.