Hey kids it’s time for Ontology Gymnastics!

Biological sex is an “artificial parameter” for deciding where prisoners should be held, Scottish National Party (SNP) ministers have told a court.

Gerry Moynihan KC, acting for the Scottish Government, argued that there should be flexibility to allow transgender women, who are biological men, to serve their sentences in female jails.

He told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that defining “a man as a man and a woman as a woman, without exceptions” was “artificial”.

I know I’ve already made fun of this, but it’s just so rewarding. Defining an X as an X is not so much artificial as it is a tautology. It’s the very opposite of a definition, because it’s just a repetition. What is an apple? It’s…well…you know, it’s an apple. That won’t get you an A on the test.

Granted, it doesn’t always matter. Maybe that’s what the poor fella is trying to say. You don’t always have to know which people are women and which are men. Much of the time it’s just not an issue.

Prisons are one place where it does matter.

Meanwhile Trump is continuing his unlovely campaign to plaster his filthy name all over everything.

Donald Trump has told the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, that he will unfreeze funds for major infrastructure projects in New York City if he supports renaming Dulles international airport and Penn Station after him.

The demand, which was first reported on Thursday by Punchbowl News, comes after the president in October halted $18bn in funding for a major subway line expansion in New York City as well as a new rail tunnel connecting the city to New Jersey. The funding freeze was announced on the first day of a 43-day government shutdown in which Schumer, who represents New York, played a major role.

It’s so trump to fail to grasp that publicly demanding and/or extorting an honor renders the honor nugatory.

No but it was a staffer, how many times do we have to tell you it was a staffer???

Following an intense backlash this morning, the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost of a video showing a racist clip depicting the Obamas as apes.

Multiple outlets cite a senior White House official as saying:

A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.

The post was up for 12 hours.

So they’re telling us there’s a staffer whose job it is to post torrents of obnoxious drivel and insults and lies in the middle of the night???

Ok, news media: you know what you have to do now. Ask them why. Ask them why that’s a job. Ask them why there is any need for someone other than Trump to vomit out all this bile at 2 in the morning.

And then there was the spin.

Oh wait, third question – are you seriously telling us that someone else is posting the idiotic drivel that spews from Trump’s twitx every night? That idiotic drivel is part of Trump’s job?

At midnight.

Knowing that men are not women is just so random, ya know? What’s the point? Relax, enjoy the ride!

Biological sex is an “artificial parameter” for deciding where prisoners should be held, Scottish National Party (SNP) ministers have told a court.

They have? Really? Surely they meant “arbitrary”? Calling it artificial seems deranged even for them.

Gerry Moynihan KC, acting for the Scottish Government, argued that there should be flexibility to allow transgender women, who are biological men, to serve their sentences in female jails.

We need that flexibility so that men can have opportunities to beat up and rape women, right? It’s just common sense.

He told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that defining “a man as a man and a woman as a woman, without exceptions” was “artificial”.

Ah so that’s how “artificial” got into it. Naming things at all is “artificial”. Language is artificial. Pass the bong.

Listen up, Scottish government: the fact remains that women and men are women and men. Men can rape women; women can be impregnated by men against their will. Men have more punching power than women, by a wide margin. Men are a threat to women in confined spaces in ways that women are not a threat to men. None of this is artificial. You can call arrangements to protect women from these unpleasant realities if you want to, but that still doesn’t make them worthless, let alone bad.

Mr Moynihan argued that classifying a trans woman inmate as a man was “a fundamental denial of their choice of gender and it’s a fundamental denial driven only by semantics”.

Oh fuck off. That doesn’t matter. Compared to the safety and rights of women, that whiney crap just does not matter.

Under the current guidance, a trans woman in Scotland can be jailed in a female jail if they have not hurt or threatened women or girls, and there is no basis to suppose that they pose an unacceptable risk.

FWS argues that this is incompatible with last year’s UK Supreme Court ruling that the definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 is based on biological sex. It has applied to the Court of Session for a judicial review seeking to quash the policy.

SNP ministers have argued that excluding biologically male trans prisoners from female jails would breach the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Mr Moynihan rejected claims that housing trans inmates in women’s jails automatically breached female inmates’ right to privacy under Article 8 of the convention.

It’s so easy for a man to dismiss women’s right to privacy. No skin off his ass, is it! Run along, girls, we just don’t care.

Calling for inmates to be treated on a case-by-case basis, he said: “Where a transgender prisoner does not pose an Article 8 problem, does not threaten the rights of others, are we to have an absolute rule that says that they must be accommodated in a prison of their sex?

“Why? The sole reason is that they are to be classified as a man. Even though they live their lives as a woman. It’s a fundamental denial of their choice of gender. And it’s a fundamental denial driven only by semantics.”

What does he even mean, “they live their lives as a woman”? That’s not a thing! They may live their lives pretending to be a woman, but that doesn’t translate to everyone else having to play along. Adults playing let’s pretend are just that, and they have zero right to demolish women’s rights in the process.

He argued that SNP ministers had to make “very complex, difficult judgments” around prisons policy and could not risk an increase in suicides among trans prisoners.

What about an increase in suicides among women prisoners?

Mr Moynihan added: “What is being asked in this case is that they be put in a straitjacket. That their best prison management judgments are constrained by an artificial parameter, that they must define a man as a man and a woman as a woman full stop, without exceptions.

That’s because there are no exceptions. A man is in fact a man, and a woman is in fact a woman. Full stop, yes.

I tried to find a news outlet for this one but it turns out the swift image-first version does the job much better. The image is the story.

I didn’t know this.

Trump throwing more toys out of the playpen:

The U.S. ambassador to Poland is lashing out at the country’s parliament speaker for the offense of not supporting President Trump’s Nobel Prize aspirations.

Ambassador Tom Rose raged at Parliament Speaker Wlodzimierz Czarzasty in an X rant on Wednesday. In the post, Rose threatened that the US would “have no further dealings, contacts, or communications” with Czarzasty, due to his “insults directed against President Trump.”

What did he say?

Czarzasty made the alleged “outrageous and unprovoked insults” toward Trump on Monday while speaking to journalists.

The 65-year-old chairman of Poland’s New Left party said he would not support U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Israeli Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana’s campaign to rally heads of the European parliaments to nominate Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

Ah. So that’s it. He doesn’t think Trump should be nominated for a Nobel peesprize. Well neither does anyone else with a functioning brain cell. We also don’t think Trump should be stamping around the landscape demanding a Nobel Peace Prize. You don’t get to demand them, and it’s ridiculous and shaming to try. You’re supposed to be surprised when you get a Nobel, not content that your orders were obeyed. You can’t order one as if it were Big Mac.

Trump, 79, has been miffed since he didn’t win the 2025 Nobel Prize, which went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. He has used the snub as a cudgel against America’s Scandinavian allies—none of which have anything to do with the Nobel Peace Prize.

You don’t get to be miffed, either. You can be privately miffed, I suppose, if you’re that determined to be an asshole, but it ends as soon as you leave your Pouting Room. You don’t go public with your delusions of value.

…he tossed out his peace-loving posture in January when he wrote to Norway, “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”

“If you won’t givittame I’ll just bomb everything. I don’t give a shit about Peace, I just want my Prize.”

Oh good, we’re making Columbus great again.

Trump is taking steps toward installing near the White House a replica of a statue of famed explorer Christopher Columbus that had been tossed into Baltimore’s harbor during his first term amid protests against institutional racism.

It’s all this political correctness, you see, paying attention to the fact that Columbus was not an unmixed blessing to all the inhabitants of the landmass he bumped into on his way to China.

The White House declined to comment to the AP on plans for the statue but reaffirmed Trump’s affinity for Columbus, whose legacy has shifted as historians and educators amplify how white European figures and their descendants treated Native Americans and enslaved Africans to develop the New World.

“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” said Trump spokesman David Ingle. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.”

Well, you see, it’s like this. Columbus bouncing onto this continent and making himself at home was heroic, but other people doing the same thing are invaders. It all depends on whether their ancestors were from Germany and Scotland or Mexico and Venezuela. You can usually tell by looking closely at their skin.

Trump endorses a traditional view of Columbus as leader of the 1492 mission that marked the unofficial beginning of European colonization in the Americas and the development of the modern economic and political order. But in recent years, Columbus also been recognized as a primary example of Western Europe’s conquest of the New World, its resources and its native people.

Not to mention the fact that he was the wedge that opened the door. He’s a symbol of the arrival of all those annoying Europeans who bounced in without an invitation.

It seems that Trump has blown past some major milestone or barrier – whatever it is that inhibits people from jabbering nonsense in public.

The bit of transcript sounds coherentish. Trump talking does not. He’s fallen off a cognitive cliff.

People don’t believe me when I say Joyce Carol Oates is stupid. No, really: she is stupid. Dense. Thick as two short planks. She does not thinkk good.

Like so:

Yes she is that stupid. She doesn’t even get that “random men” and “transgender persons” can be one and the same. She doesn’t even get that “random men” can idennify as women and proceed to commit violent acts against girls and women.

The UN’s Reem Alsalem speaks up:

GENEVA – A UN expert today expressed serious concern over the United Kingdom’s failure to ensure the effective implementation of a landmark Supreme Court judgment clarifying that the term “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex.

“The continued absence of clear, updated guidance and effective enforcement measures has resulted in widespread non-compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling,” said Reem Alsalem, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. “This situation undermines legal certainty with particularly serious consequences for women and girls.”

The Special Rapporteur welcomed the ruling in her report following her recent visit to the United Kingdom. She recommended that the UK Government ensure that all public and private institutions uphold the Supreme Court ruling , and that it provide the necessary guidance to all segments of society to understand the implications of the ruling.

“Without implementation, a court judgment offers little protection in practice,” Alsalem said. “Women and girls are left exposed to continued rights violations and are often compelled to rely on litigation to enforce protections that should already be guaranteed by law — an option that is prohibitively costly and inaccessible for many.”

Keir Starmer PLEASE NOTE. And please act. Instead of stalling the way you’ve been doing for nearly a year now.

Nearly one year after the Supreme Court’s ruling of 16 April 2025 in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, the expert noted that the judgment is yet to be translated into binding guidance or enforced across public authorities and service providers. The expert expressed particular concern that non-compliance appears to extend to government departments and public sector bodies, including the National Health Service, the prison service, universities and schools.

“Although the UK Government has accepted that the Supreme Court judgment reflects the law, many public bodies reportedly claim they are awaiting government action to secure parliamentary approval of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s revised Code of Practice on Services, Public Functions and Associations,” the expert said. “At the same time, the earlier 2011 Code — now outdated and inconsistent with the ruling — reportedly remains in use.”

It’s not much use grudgingly and merely verbally “accepting” that the ruling is the law and then refusing to act on it. In fact it looks remarkably like intentionally ignoring the law after saying “Ok ok we hear you.” It borders on trumpish.

She stressed that the judgment was intended to resolve years of legal confusion surrounding women’s rights to single-sex services, facilities, associations and sports — rights that are central to safeguarding women’s safety, privacy and dignity, and to combating male violence against women and girls. As the first anniversary of the judgment approaches, the expert urged the Government to act without further delay.

“Prompt issuance of compliance guidance and decisive enforcement are essential to give effect to the Supreme Court’s ruling,” the expert said. “Failure to do so not only weakens legal protections for women and girls, but risks eroding public confidence in the rule of law.”

How about it, boys? Time to stop stalling yet?

Welp it seems the genie is out of the bottle.

Trump: I hate even talking about ICE. 2 people out of tens of thousands and you get bad publicity.

Host: But it was 2 Americans who died—

Trump: We have the smallest trucks. We've been very tough on the waters

Host: The waters?

Trump: The waters where we knock out boats pic.twitter.com/BPTA7MBMeE

— FactPost (@factpostnews) February 5, 2026

The twelve of us

They haven’t thought this through.

Sermon says men can ‘physically discipline’ rebellious wives “as a last resort”

Last month, Birmingham mosque Green Lane Masjid and Community Centre (GLMCC) live streamed a sermon in which Aqeel Mahmood (pictured) said “discipline in the case of rebellion” is one of the “rights of the husband over the wife”.

He said: “The husband is a leader. He has his responsibilities. Physical discipline is a last resort on the condition that it doesn’t cause pain, injury, fear or humiliation”.

Quick question: if physical discipline doesn’t cause pain, injury, fear or humiliation then what does it cause? What’s it for? What’s the point of it?

It’s a ridiculous claim. The whole point of “physical discipline” is to cause pain. That’s true when parents do it to children and when husbands do it to wives. Here’s a little-known fact: there’s a reason it’s a man blathering about disciplining wives and not the other way around. What’s the reason? Same as the reason parents discipline children and not the other way around. Men hit women because they can. Women can’t compete.

It’s not discipline, it’s anger and contempt and domination.

Mahmood also said a husband has a “right” to “intimacy” with his wife and a wife must not leave the house without her husband’s permission. Mahmood is understood to be an imam at the centre.

The charity’s “welfare and wellbeing” services include a “domestic abuse support” service.

The National Secular Society, which has reported GLMCC to the Charity Commission twice since 2024 over misogyny concerns, has sent this latest information to the regulator.

GLMCC was featured in the NSS’s September report on misogyny in religious charities, which was raised during Prime Minister’s Questions last month. Keir Starmer said he would “make sure” to look into the specific issue of religious charities and misogyny.

Let us know when you’ve looked and what you’re going to do, please.

H/t Jesus and Mo

Oh you celebrate, do you? What next? Celebrating bound feet? Girls married off at age ten, eight, six? FGM? Slavery? Rape? Sati?

All of that, plus it implies that women are slutty hoors who lure men to their doom, as opposed to being subordinated by men who think women are slutty hoors.

Gut punch.

Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

Below: an excerpt from an article  in the Democratic Socialists of America website:

We should support an immediate cease fire, large-scale humanitarian aid, global support for rebuilding Ukraine, and negotiations to  achieve a compromise settlement of what is an underlying conflict between the United States and Russian  imperialist interests.   In a future socialist world there should be no role for spheres of interest for large  countries. However, in the capitalist world we live in,  a viable settlement of this conflict  would have to accept Russia’s right to have security guarantees in its neighborhood. A Ukraine  settlement that includes neutrality for Ukraine along with U.S. and Russian guarantees of  Ukraine’s independence and security could avert further bloodshed and bring some stability to  the region. 

 The Left should continue to point out the role of U.S. imperialism in pushing a NATO  expansion policy that was bound to lead to a costly and dangerous conflict, while also  noting the responsibility of U.S. imperialism for its role in creating the retrograde oligarchic Putin  regime that severely oppresses its own working class while also imposing a deadly war on  working people in neighboring Ukraine.

So, the DSA charges the United States with: (a) the transparently false pretext the Putin regime uses for its imperial aggression against Ukraine; and (b) the even more far-fetched accusation of creating the Putin regime itself.  Unaccountably,  DSA fails to denounce the US for the failure of the USSR, the drying up of the Aral Sea, and the dismal weather of Siberia.    We can expect these accusations from another groupuscule,  Democratic Flat-Earthers of America.  DFEA will no doubt also proclaim “resistance” against airlines, shipping companies, and academic Geography departments for their adherence to the view that planet earth is round.

The big question:

How about this is the last time, eh? How about from now on there is pushback when Trump attacks a woman. How about all the journalists shout at him with one voice. How about he gets humiliated and shamed and rebuked.

Heather Cox Richardson January 31:

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media this morning:

“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”

After his call for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government, Miller went on to reject the idea that Haitians living and working legally in Ohio should be described as part of Ohio communities. Calling out Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate again this year, for including them, Miller posted: “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.”

Democrats just flatly reject a lot of things. Slavery is one. Punishment by torture is another. Murder is one more.

History is doing that rhyming thing again.

In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC), a wealthy enslaver, rose to explain to his northern colleagues why their objection to human enslavement was so badly misguided. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he said. Such workers needed few brains and little skill; they just had to be strong, docile, and loyal to their betters, who would organize their labor and then collect the profits from it, concentrating that wealth into their own hands to move society forward efficiently.

Hammond called such workers “the mud-sill of society and political government.” Much like the beams driven into the ground to support a stately home above, the mudsill supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” The South had pushed Black Americans into that mudsill role. “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves,” he said. The North also had a mudsill class, he added: “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”

But Hammond warned that the North was making a terrible mistake. “Our slaves do not vote,” he said. “We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided…by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Or, to put it another way, one generation would pave the way for the next generation to get an education and have more options than being an underpaid overworked laborer. The horror!

The thinking behind Miller’s ideal is that some people just are suited only for grunt work. They’re born that way, their parents were born that way, their children will be born that way. It’s their essence. That used to be quite a normal thing to think, but it has faded out over time. Seeing as how we’ve had at least a couple of centuries of seeing the children of workers and enslaved people get educations and – miraculously! – turn out to be capable of far more than grunt work, you’d think Stephen Miller could manage to make the connection.

H/t Mike Haubrich