Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • He got lucky

    Ok so we’re wallowing in Andy schadenfreude. I’m fine with that.

    The image of a stunned Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor slumped back in a car after his arrest has been splashed over newspapers and websites worldwide.

    Slumped back, slack-jawed, eyes gleaming sinisterly.

    And the Reuters photographer who took it, Liverpool-born Phil Noble, said capturing the moment was “more luck than judgement”.

    When news broke on Thursday morning that the King’s brother had been detained by police, Noble drove six hours south from his Manchester home to Norfolk where the former prince resides.

    We thank him for his service.

  • Effort to move past

    Maybe royalty just isn’t all that important in the first place?

    Former Prince Andrew’s Arrest Upends Royal Effort to Move Past His Scandal

    King Charles III’s family, long rocked by infighting and grievous losses, is facing what could be the gravest threat to its moral authority in more than a generation.

    But what moral authority?

    What moral authority does the “royal family” have in the first place?

    They’re just a set of people descended from a set of people descended from a set of people etc for many generations. That’s all. The big difference is that their status is inherited as opposed to worked for or chosen by a majority of the people. That’s it! That’s the purported moral authority! It’s not much, is it.

    It may bring with it a sense of duty. That was apparently very much the case with Andrew’s mother, and very much not the case with the notorious Juke of Windsor. In any case a sense of duty by itself is not really a reason to have an inherited monarchy, especially such a rich and expensive one. Just saying.

    For decades, Sandringham Estate has been a place for the House of Windsor to escape from it all. Three hours northeast of London, the palatial country house, its 20,000 sprawling acres and residences are where King Charles III and his family celebrate Christmas, waving to admirers as they parade to church services in their holiday best.

    Well thank god they have a place to “escape from it all” eh wot?

    Early Thursday morning, the idyllic estate was swarmed by unmarked police cars as officers arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the king’s brother, amid allegations that he shared confidential government information with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender. Later in the night, he would return to Sandringham, slinking low in the back seat of a black sport utility vehicle, with news cameras craning to capture his release.

    The scenes of Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, already stripped of his title and kicked out of his longtime home, could be seen as an unmistakable message about the end of an era. Not since King Charles I was arrested and tried for treason nearly four centuries ago, in January 1649, has a British royal been detained.

    So, that’s kind of fun.

    Mind you, that Windsor fella came pretty close. He was carefully watched all through WWII, because he was pro-Nazi and did some very sketchy things.

    The arrest follows years in which the king, and before him his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, stayed silent on separate accusations that Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor forced Virginia Giuffre to have sex with him after she was trafficked by Mr. Epstein when she was 17 years old. The former prince has denied those allegations and wrongdoing related to Mr. Epstein.

    “The royal family, far from dutifully serving the public in connection with this scandal that has enveloped Andrew, have not been transparent. They have not been forthcoming, secrets have persisted,” said Ed Owens, a historian and expert on Britain’s royal family. “It’s this lack of transparency that is the driving force of the moral problem at the heart of the mess for the monarchy.”

    Because that’s the nature of monarchy, isn’t it. It’s arbitrary; it does what it wants. It’s a set of people who are made Special solely because of which parents they were born to. It’s a form of magic, and magic can’t afford to be transparent.

  • One day a week on inclusivity programmes

    Starmer’s new Cabinet Secretary made staff join non-binary book club

    Seriously?

    Dame Antonia Romeo told a civil servant to join a “gender non-conforming book club” as part of their performance review.

    The new Cabinet Secretary set out plans for the former staff member to spend one day a week on inclusivity programmes when she was head of the Department for International Trade (DIT) from 2017 to 2021.

    These included helping to raise “awareness and visibility of non-binary identities” and attending the book club, according to documents reviewed by The Telegraph.

    The employee was told to spend up to 20 per cent of their time fulfilling inclusivity goals such as encouraging colleagues to display their preferred pronouns and “recruiting non-binary staff”.

    Is she 15? 12?

    It must be significance-envy. The older cohort got to campaign against racism and sexism and classism, so what’s left for the younger crowd? Magic gender. It’s that or nothing, so it has to be that.

    Mind you, it’s not really nothing. It’s continuing to campaign against racism and sexism and classism, because oddly enough those battles haven’t been won yet. But the trouble is, that’s old news. Old news is stale news; Dame Antonia must want something more exciting.

    As part of an annual review, she set the employee a target of joining the department’s “gender non-conforming book club”, where government workers supposedly read Middlesex, a 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides about an intersex American, as well as books about people transitioning gender, the source said.

    Other activities allegedly assigned directly by Dame Antonia included participating in “discussion of the non-binary corporate network” and “challenging dated and discriminatory societal gender norms of expression, presentation, behaviours, roles or expectations that reinforce the patriarchy”.

    Uh oh uh oh – the patriarchy? That sounds dangerously close to tranzfobeea, What about people who identify as patriarchs? Eh? Go back 20 paces and do not collect $200.

    In pursuit of a high Stonewall ranking, DIT, under Dame Antonia’s watch, had “tranquillity rooms/safe spaces, glitter jars, hugging pillows, and training classes about bisexuality awareness”, the former member of staff claimed.

    In an all-staff email sent in 2020 and seen by The Telegraph, Dame Antonia shared the account of a non-binary member of staff to celebrate non-binary awareness week. The blog post encouraged colleagues to “support non-binary colleagues in the workplace” and included advice on how to be an ally.

    Suggestions included putting preferred pronouns in email signatures and avoiding the phrase “ladies and gentleman” in favour of “more inclusive alternatives such as ‘everyone’”.

    Other recommendations were to avoid gendered words to describe members of your family and instead use “‘parents’, ‘partner’, ‘siblings’”.

    “If I am making notes in a meeting or referring to another person, I will politely say ‘can I just check which pronouns you prefer?’ – it’s as easy as that!” the blog post read.

    Yes but the issue is not whether it’s easy or not, it’s whether it’s batshit crazy or not. It is in fact batshit crazy.

  • Famous last word

    Sigh.

    The problem is not emasculation.

    There is no shortage of masculinity around.

    Congress is no longer an all-male legislative body.

    Fretting about emasculation is a standing insult to women.

    I’m very tired of casual insults to women.

  • North Korea vibes

    Ewwwwwwwwwwwww

  • where they are safest

    Classic of indifference to women and their safety and wellbeing.

    He means the decision to ban men from the spaces where women are safest, but of course he can’t say it that way.

    He’s a women-hating weasel, Thomas Willett is.

  • Strengthen up

    Trump has set up his very own imitation UN, and he’s giving it 10 billion dollars of our money.

    Trump promised that the United States would commit $10 billion to his Board of Peace, the body created for the security and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip, although he did not specify the source of that funding.

    Well it’s not coming out of his wallet.

    Trump described the Board of Peace as an institution that would “strengthen up the United Nations,” perhaps answering those who questioned whether he was trying to set up a competitor to the U.N. But he also described the Board as a group that is “going to almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly.”

    The Charter of the United Nations, signed in San Francisco in 1945, does not provide for any oversight organization.

    Nor does it name Trump as just the right fella to set up such an organization.

    Trump just said the United States would pay $10 billion into the Board of Peace, which he created and leads.

    He gave no details on where the money would come from or if the administration had even requested it from Congress, which would have to approve the funds.

    Huh? Wut? Wut mean? He’s the boss, he gets to give the money away and he doesn’t have to explain anything to the New York stinkin’ Times.

    President Trump used his opening remarks at the Board of Peace meeting to reiterate his call for Iran to make a deal with him on his nuclear program, otherwise “bad things will happen.”

    At one point he seemed to tease the possibility of military action: “You’re going to be finding out probably over the next 10 days,” he said. The U.S. military is building up forces in the Middle East for a possible strike.

    Because Board of Peace.

    The puns write themselves.

    Trump has opened the Board of Peace event while top members of his government watch from the stage. This Trump-founded and Trump-led body was set up as a kind of rival to the United Nations. “In terms of power and in terms of prestige there’s never been anything close because these are the greatest leaders,” Trump said in his opening remarks.

    But America’s NATO allies have refused to join, and Trump acknowledged that some nations were absent. “Some are playing a little cute,” he said.

    Nations that have joined include Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Indonesia, Pakistan and Qatar.

    Mmmmmm. I think I’ll just play a little cute, thanks.

  • Hiring

    This raises an interesting question, at least for me.

    At first glance “Nobody should lose their job because they have a ‘gender identity’” seems right, but then second glance isn’t quite so sure.

    Having a gender identity=having a very feeble grasp on reality.

    In a card shop that probably wouldn’t matter much, but in a lot of other jobs it would. I don’t think employers in general want to hire people who live a fantasy life that’s not tucked safely away in their minds but conspicuously performed all day every day. It says things about their thinking and about how they’re likely to interact with colleagues and the public, doesn’t it? Is it fair to say that?

    It’s two things, really, or perhaps more. It’s a glitch in thinking, and it’s a predictor of odd behavior on the job. Both of those are important considerations for most jobs.

    Correct me if I’m wrong.

  • Based on self-identification

    In single-sex spaces news:

    The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has concluded its regulatory action following the review of policies identified through the UK Government’s 2024 call for input exercise on single-sex spaces.

    In August 2025, the EHRC wrote to 19 organisations identified through this exercise whose policies misrepresented the Equality Act 2010 by wrongly suggesting there is an automatic legal right to access single-sex spaces based on self-identification. These organisations spanned the policing, education and health sectors. All 19 organisations have now removed the policies in question.

    In other words people can no longer bounce into the other sex’s spaces simply by announcing “I am that other sex.” It makes sense. It’s kind of like the policy that random people can’t bounce into other people’s houses or apartments simply by announcing “I am you.”

    The EHRC’s action followed the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers (April 2025), which confirmed that the terms “man”, “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. Trans people continue to be protected from discrimination under the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

    But that doesn’t stop them complaining about not being able to demolish women’s rights.

  • Submit

    Where we are:

    Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, who has argued that wives should submit to their husbands, women should be denied the vote, and Christian enslavers were on “firm scriptural ground,” led a worship service at the Pentagon this week at the invitation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

    Women should be stomped into submission, while men should be free to do all the things Donald Trump has done, because that’s the Christian rule. Just ask the bible if you don’t believe me.

    Critics have questioned Hegseth’s elevation of Christianity within the Defense Department. The secretary instituted monthly prayer meetings at the Pentagon last May.

    Fred Wellman, a West Point graduate and 20-year Army veteran running for Congress from Missouri, called Wilson’s appearance this week an “unconstitutional and extreme attack” on the First Amendment.

    “Hegseth is using his official position to make his religion the official one of the Department of Defense using official facilities, communications channels and personnel,” he wrote on X. “This must end and must be investigated.”

    But, of course, it won’t end and it won’t be investigated.

  • Grizzled veterans

    Akua Reindorf on the protracted refusal to comply:

    Even for grizzled veterans of the gender wars, it was surreal that the court needed to spell out that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, a woman is a person born female and not a person born male. More surreal still is the fact that, for ten months now, many employers and service providers have simply ignored the judgment and have continued to allow males to use women’s facilities.

    What is not a surprise is that this widespread defiance of the law has been brought about by a campaign of disinformation waged by trans rights activists. It was just such a campaign that convinced employers and service providers they were legally obliged to allow trans people to use opposite-sex facilities in the first place. That false idea should have been laid to rest by the judgment in For Women Scotland. Instead, activists claimed that the judgment is “not yet law” until parliament passes the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s statutory code of practice.

    Which parliament is conspicuously not getting around to doing. What a surprise.

    Last Friday the High Court rejected the latest attempt to frustrate the process through a judicial review brought against the EHRC by the omnicause campaign group the Good Law Project. The High Court dismissed all the arguments deployed by GLP’s barristers against an interim update published by the EHRC last year. It also rejected the submissions made on behalf of Phillipson, who was an interested party in the case. Having stated that she was taking a neutral stance, her submissions were obviously aligned with those of GLP.

    That last sentence is ambiguous. I think it needs a “despite” before “Having stated.” I think the point is that Phillipson claimed to be neutral but has come down heavily on the side of the men in lipstick.

    A letter sent by GLP to Phillipson on the same day demanded that she return the code to the EHRC to be rewritten, on the basis that it was now clearly “wrong about the law”. Nothing in the High Court’s judgment remotely resembled this egregious spin.

    Depressingly, at least three MPs immediately went in to bat alongside GLP. It is likely that these backbench interventions will intensify the pressure on Phillipson.

    All for the glorious cause of demolishing women’s rights.

  • We don’t know what it’s like?

    You have got to be kidding us.

    Oh yes, there’s a lot we take for granted, because we’re…not punished for acting in a way that is feminine. Is that right Bucko? Are you sure? Have you ever taken a peek at the stats on male violence against women? Given those stats, isn’t it kind of obvious that we are punished for acting in a way that is feminine? Granted not in the way you mean, i.e. being a man and putting on lipstick and a tiny skirt, but in the more general way, which codes everything women do as irritatingly wrong and sly and womany. Women are very much at risk from men with short tempers, and such men are not scarce. Your discomfort with yourself is a you thing, and we do not care.

  • Highly disturbing allegations

    Andy Borowitz:

    California US House Rep. Ted Lieu has dropped explosive new allegations against Donald Trump over the mention of the latter’s name in the Epstein files. Lieu claimed that the unredacted Epstein files, which were viewed by a select group of US House Reps, contain disturbing allegations against Trump.

    “Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times,” Lieu said. “In those files, there are highly disturbing allegations, allegations of Donald Trump raping children and threatening to kill children.”

    I don’t think he would risk saying that if it weren’t true, because Trump.

  • Millions of files

    We do keep pointing it out – that misogyny is a thing, that it’s not obscure or rare, that a lot of men really do have profound contempt for women, which can easily tip into hatred and violence.

    Millions of files related to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein suggest the existence of a “global criminal enterprise” that carried out acts meeting the legal threshold of crimes against humanity, a panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations human rights council has said.

    The experts said crimes outlined in documents released by the US justice department were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption and extreme misogyny. The crimes, they said, showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls.

    “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” they said in a statement.

    We keep telling you…

  • The limelight

    Jolyon gets dragged by a minor local journalistic outfit known as The Times.

    That’s gotta sting.

    Lawyers, academics and activists have turned on the Good Law Project, accusing it of “selling hope” through fundraising to fight for transgender rights, despite being repeatedly defeated in court.

    In a letter to Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister, more than 30 barristers and legal academics accused the project, a non-profit campaign organisation, of publishing “egregiously false” claims about a High Court ruling on single-sex spaces last week.

    Mr Justice Swift on Friday dismissed a legal challenge brought by the project against Britain’s rights watchdog over a now-removed update on its website, which said that trans women “should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities” in workplaces or public-facing services such as shops and hospitals. The same applied for trans men using men’s lavatories.

    Yes, but trans men are not a potential threat to men the way trans women are a potential threat to women.

    The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published the update in April last year, just over a week after the UK’s highest court ruled in April that the words “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 referred to a biological woman and biological sex.

    …

    Jolyon Maugham, the founder and executive director of the Good Law Project, said after the judgment that “the judiciary can’t be trusted always” in a reaction that critics have dubbed “Trumpian”.

    The project claimed the ruling meant that Phillipson must reject guidance submitted by the EHRC on single-sex spaces, and started a fundraiser that has brought in tens of thousands of pounds to appeal. Separately, it has crowdfunded more than £150,000 for its “fighting fund for trans rights”.

    One has to admit, they’re good at the grifting part. Results, not so much.

    In their letter to Phillipson, the lawyers and academics said GLP had made inaccurate conclusions about the ruling, specifically in claiming “the High Court makes clear that service providers are not obliged to exclude trans people from gendered spaces and services”.

    Hey it’s just a typo. Nobody knows how that “not” got in there. Must be the intern.

    The project also claimed the court had said it was “not true” that allowing a woman-only space to be accessed by biological women and transgender women was “very likely to amount to unlawful sex discrimination”. The lawyers’ letter said: “The Good Law Project’s assertion to the contrary is straightforwardly false.”

    The letter said any “uncertainty or complexity” around the Supreme Court judgment last year was “compounded (if not directly caused) by the dissemination of false information, such as that now promulgated by the Good Law Project”. It added: “We are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.”

    Ouch. That’s harsh. I hope Joly is reading it over and over and over…

  • Egregiously false law project

    Jolyon gets the attention he so richly deserves. The Times:

    More than 30 barristers and academics have accused the campaign group of making ‘egregiously false’ claims about a High Court ruling on single-sex spaces.

    In other words they have accused Jolyon and his groupuscule of repeatedly lying.

    Lawyers, academics and activists have turned on the Good Law Project, accusing it of “selling hope” through fundraising to fight for transgender rights, despite being repeatedly defeated in court.

    In a letter to Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister, more than 30 barristers and legal academics accused the project, a non-profit campaign organisation, of publishing “egregiously false” claims about a High Court ruling on single-sex spaces last week.

    Mr Justice Swift on Friday dismissed a legal challenge brought by the project against Britain’s rights watchdog over a now-removed update on its website, which said that trans women “should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities” in workplaces or public-facing services such as shops and hospitals. The same applied for trans men using men’s lavatories.

    You’d think it would be self-evident. Men don’t get to use women’s facilities, because men are men. Duh.

    The project claimed the ruling meant that Phillipson must reject guidance submitted by the EHRC on single-sex spaces, and started a fundraiser that has brought in tens of thousands of pounds to appeal. Separately, it has crowdfunded more than £150,000 for its “fighting fund for trans rights”.

    Well you don’t expect them to do all this pestering for free do you?

    In their letter to Phillipson, the lawyers and academics said GLP had made inaccurate conclusions about the ruling, specifically in claiming “the High Court makes clear that service providers are not obliged to exclude trans people from gendered spaces and services”.

    That’s not so much inaccurate as…how shall I put this…an untruth.

    The project also claimed the court had said it was “not true” that allowing a woman-only space to be accessed by biological women and transgender women was “very likely to amount to unlawful sex discrimination”. The lawyers’ letter said: “The Good Law Project’s assertion to the contrary is straightforwardly false.”

    The wording here is fuzzier than I would like, but I think what it’s saying is that Jolyon’s Project said things that are not true, aka straightforwardly false.

    The letter said any “uncertainty or complexity” around the Supreme Court judgment last year was “compounded (if not directly caused) by the dissemination of false information, such as that now promulgated by the Good Law Project”. It added: “We are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.”

    Ouch! That’s not flattering.

    Posting on a popular pro-transgender forum, one user said: “Maugham always pretends he’s had some sort of win even when he has unambiguously and comprehensively lost. He did the same with his Brexit cases. I’m fed up of this turd polisher claiming he does so much for us.”

    snerksnerksnerk

  • Guest post: The conditions required

    Originally a comment by Artymorty on If.

    It’s extra infuriating when it’s gay men making these kinds of arguments, because we know more than most how much male transvestism is driven by fetish — we see it in our community, on the dating apps, in the leather bars, etc. Within the gay male community, both online and in the real world in virtually any big city, there are designated secluded, judgment-free zones for men to let their sexual quirks and kinks out in private.

    I can see how at least some degree of cameraderie between gay men and straight or bisexual transvestites emerged: both groups lived with sexual desires that were seen as incompatible with proper society. But as homosexuality has found mainstream acceptance, transvestism cannot follow in its footsteps — at least not in the way that it wants — because it’s a fundamentally different thing. Homosexuals can integrate happily into society without forcing anyone to play along with a lie, and without impinging on other people’s rights. (Well, maybe a few Christian wedding cake bakers will take issue with that last point.)

    Transvestites can in theory integrate into society, too: they just have to stay out of women’s spaces and stop demanding that everyone call them women. And they don’t want to do that.

    And gay men who style themselves as allies to transwomen are failing to see that the conditions required for transwomen to get what they want are not the same as the conditions that gay men required to get what we wanted. We only needed people to tolerate us. The transwomen want women to actively play along with a fantasy. That’s not the same thing at all. It’s a great big fork in the road, where their paths and ours diverge.

    And the thing about admitting they’re men is, they already do it when they’re among us gay men. If a trans-identifying man enters a men-only bar or logs into a men-only dating app, he’s tacitly admitting that he’s a man. And it happens all the time. The apps are overflowing with them; the leather bars have special nights for them, etc. They often go further than that: the very same men who insist they’re transwomen when they’re at work or shouting at people on Twitter or whatever, they will categorize themselves as “CD/TV” (crossdresser/transvestite) in their online profiles when they want to socialize in men-only virtual spaces, for example.

    They know what they are, they know what they’re doing. And so does Peter Tatchell.

  • A striking anomaly

    Jonathan Kay at Quillette:

    On 10 February, Jesse Van Rootselaar (also known as Jesse Strang) killed eight people in the remote British Columbia mining town of Tumbler Ridge. The first two victims were the killer’s mother and half-brother, whom Van Rootselaar shot at home. Van Rootselaar then went to a local secondary school and murdered six more people—five of whom were twelve- or thirteen-year-old students—before committing suicide. Twenty-seven others were injured. It was the deadliest Canadian school shooting in almost four decades, and the highest-casualty mass-shooting event in the nation’s history.

    …

    When news of the tragedy was first reported to Canadians on the afternoon of 10 February, it appeared to include a striking anomaly: The killer, we were told, was a “woman.” There are scattered examples of female killers in the annals of Canadian crime. But this would be the first time in the recorded history of Canada and its colonial antecedents—going back more than 400 years, to the early seventeenth century—that a woman had gone on this kind of murderous rampage.

    It soon became clear, however, that Van Rootselaar wasn’t a woman. He was an eighteen-year-old man—a gun-obsessed, middle-school dropout whose many mental-health afflictions happened to include gender dysphoria. The mass murderer called himself a woman. But that doesn’t mean he was, or that the rest of us have to live in the imaginary universe he (literally) built for himself.

    According to Royal Canadian Mounted Police deputy commissioner Dwayne McDonald, Jesse was “a biological male” who “approximately six years ago began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly.” In keeping with Canadian policies implemented by Justin Trudeau’s government in 2017, McDonald and other police officials then proceeded to refer to the killer with female pronouns, as if he actually were a woman.

    It’s so heart-warming when the government orders us to lie about a male committing mass murder.

    This kind of institutionally mandated misuse of language is dishonest at the best of times. But it is especially offensive when it serves to misrepresent reality on behalf of a murderer (posthumously or otherwise). 

    And – what Jonathan Kay fails to point out – when it serves to misrepresent reality about which sex is more prone to extreme violence. Women just don’t do this shit, and that matters.

    Men are more violent than women, which is why they account for more than ninety percent of the world’s prison population, and commit about ninety percent of all homicides. For acts of mass murder, US data puts the corresponding figure at 98 percent. This greater tendency toward violence is rooted largely in male evolutionary psychology, and doesn’t get erased when a man changes his pronouns or puts on a skirt. Simply put, being male (and young) represents one of the most important risk factors that exist when it comes to violent crime.

    There. Better late than never.

  • Political asylum in the what now?

    The theocrat’s veto:

    If the Turkish man on trial for burning a copy of the Quran loses his case on Tuesday, the Trump administration is preparing to offer him political asylum in the United States.

    According to the Telegraph, State Department officials are already making plans to help him leave the country. Let that sink in. A man who came to Britain as a refugee — fleeing the Islamic terrorism that, as he puts it, destroyed his family’s life in Turkey — may soon have to flee Britain itself and seek asylum in America because we cannot protect his human rights. I cannot think of anything more embarrassing for Sir Keir Starmer.

    So what’s this case about? On 13 February last year, Hamit Coskun — a Turkish-born atheist of Armenian-Kurdish descent — travelled to the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge and set fire to a Koran as a political protest against what he considers the Islamification of his homeland.

    A passer-by, Moussa Kadri, attacked him with a knife before kicking him to the ground. Kadri received nothing more than a suspended sentence, but Coskun was convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence — another name for blasphemy, an offence Parliament abolished eighteen years ago.

    Only eighteen years ago.

    And only to replace it with a new form of blasphemy, which being interpreted is the audacious refusal to believe that men can be women.

    The Free Speech Union, which I run, and the National Secular Society took up his cause. At Southwark Crown Court in October, his conviction was overturned.

    Mr Justice Bennathan ruled that while burning a Koran might be something many Muslims find deeply upsetting, the right to freedom of expression must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.

    But the Crown Prosecution Service, which originally charged Coskun with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” to “the religious institution of Islam”, is now appealing to the High Court to get that acquittal overturned. The hearing is tomorrow.

    How is it possible to cause alarm or distress to a religion or a “a religious institution” called Islam? A religion is an abstraction; it doesn’t have feelings. Islam did not quiver all over when Coskun burned the Koran; Islam in fact had no reaction at all, because it can’t, because it has no body and no brain.

    If the CPS succeeds, it will establish a chilling principle: that breaking an Islamic blasphemy code — whether by burning a Koran or showing schoolchildren cartoons of Mohammed — will become a religiously aggravated public order offence, provided the blasphemer is violently attacked by a Muslim fanatic.

    You’ve heard of the heckler’s veto. This would create a stabber’s veto. It would sound the death knell for free speech in Britain.

    …

    The FSU and the National Secular Society are jointly funding Coskun’s legal defence because this case is about far more than one man and one Koran.

    It is about whether the criminal law can be used to enforce a de facto Islamic blasphemy code. It is about whether violent thugs get a veto over what the rest of us are permitted to say, write, draw, or burn.

    And it is about whether Britain remains the kind of country in which political dissidents from tyrannical regimes can seek refuge — or the kind from which they flee.

    Mind you, I don’t recommend fleeing to Trump’s US. He may welcome rebels against Islam, but rebels against the Maga version of Baby Jesus are a whole other story.

  • Bawdy

    One small item from a Mother Jones piece about Trump and Epstein:

    Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal’s response rips the hide off Trump’s case on many levels. For instance, it contends, rather reasonably, that reporting Trump was pals with Epstein before Epstein was busted is not defamatory. But the killer argument is that the WSJ article was “consistent with plaintiff’s reputation.” Trump, Murdoch’s lawyers maintain, “admitted to instances of using bawdy language when discussing women. Plaintiff thus cannot allege that the Article damaged his reputation.”

    “Bawdy” is doing a lot of work here. Murdoch’s lawyers could have gone with “sleazy” or “lecherous” or “misogynist.” But they landed on a Benny Hill-ish description that’s less offensive in tone. 

    Of course they do. Always. Mainstream bros writing and talking in mainstream media always minimize sexual harassment this way. They think it is minimal. They think it’s trivial, and they think women don’t matter enough to make it not trivial. Just bitches whining, amirite?

    Murdoch asks the court to “take judicial notice of both the extensive public reporting of [Trump’s] past comments” and notes that Trump “has a well-documented reputation for bawdiness based on his past statements about women.” The complaint serves up examples starting with Trump’s infamous remark: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

    There it is again, in the very next paragraph. “Bawdiness.” Not misogyny, not sexism, not contempt for and belittlement of women; just the playful and forgivable “bawdiness” that’s just good beefy fun for all concerned.

    Once you notice this kind of thing you see it everywhere. That’s because it is, in fact, everywhere.