What a gorgeous dog (and I say that as a cat person – I’d never be able to give this beautiful being what it needs to be happy 🥲) https://t.co/E3vw2jsaFB
The installation consists of five large display boards arranged in a line. Mounted on each of the middle three boards is a disembodied pair of crossed female legs. They’re like the legs you see on mannequins in the hosiery sections of department stores: long, slender, and carefully positioned for aesthetic effect. They begin at the top of the thigh and end in Barbie-style feet wearing high-heeled court shoes. They are “diverse” insofar as they represent a range of skin colours, but there is no diversity in relation to age, body-size or personal style. The imaginary woman these legs belong to is clearly young, slim, and conventionally feminine. On its own the visual element of the display could easily be mistaken for a lingerie ad: it’s far from obvious what legs have to do with cervical cancer. But the connection is spelled out in the verbal message, which is split between the two outer display boards. Both parts address the viewer directly and in the imperative: on the left, “don’t keep ‘em crossed”, and on the right, “get screened instead”.
While there are many things to object to about this installation, the thing I found so shocking that it rendered me temporarily speechless was that injunction “don’t keep ’em crossed”. It’s offensive because the crossing and uncrossing of a woman’s legs is a well-worn metaphor for sexual continence or incontinence. That’s the real reason why girls are taught that it’s “ladylike” to sit with your legs crossed (and “unladylike” to sit with them apart): while this is often presented as a matter of aesthetics or good taste, what it’s really about is modesty, in the sense of chastity. By adopting a posture that completely conceals her genital area, a woman signals that she is not available for sex.
That and even more, I think. It’s about modesty/chastity but also about disgust. It’s a love/hate thing. The female genital area is a site of whoopee yay hooray but also ew ugh gross.
The flipside, of course, is that the uncrossing of a woman’s legs becomes a sign that she is open to sexual propositions. When I was growing up in the 1970s people often said, about both rape and unwanted pregnancy, was that all a woman had to do to prevent it was “keep her legs crossed”. This was a commonplace form of victim-blaming and slut-shaming, but it also had a flipside which might be called “prude-shaming”. The woman who did “keep ’em crossed” could be accused of denying men access because she was “uptight”, frigid and sexually repressed. Which is also what “don’t keep ‘em crossed/get screened instead” implies—that it’s uptightness that stops women from getting screened.
More damned if we do and damned if we don’t. That thing between the legs is desired and despised.
the NHS and cancer charities have form for this. In 2021 the health app myGP ran a bizarre online campaign suggesting young women could remind their social media followers about the importance of regular smear tests by posting a picture of the type of cat (long-haired, short-haired or hairless) that best represented the current state of their pubic hair. The cat, obviously, was code for the explicitly sexualized term “pussy”. And it’s not just cervical cancer that gets this treatment. One Twitter commenter reminded me that in 2020 the Sun newspaper, which for several decades was famous for featuring a daily topless pin-up photo on page 3, ran a campaign to encourage breast self-examination whose title and slogan was “CoppaFeel!”. And in Canada a campaign to raise awareness of ovarian cancer renamed the ovaries “ladyballs”: its slogan was “have the ladyballs to do something about it”.
Men are people; women are a collection of sex organs.
The issue of slavery as a generator of wealth (which provides the ability to take advantage of ‘innovation’) has been considered at least since the 1960s.
But I and others beg to differ – there is a lot more to say about the magnitude and direction of the ‘giant pool of money’ from slavery ‘compensation’ funds suddenly available for private investment in the 1830s. I believe a young man named David Turner is currently working on this.
With respect to the United States, a series of books was published in the last couple of decades overturning the ‘progressive industrial North vs backwards rural South’ story we learned in history class; in my opinion this is the best of these.
We, particularly the English, like to believe in the just world – that we’re more successful on the global stage because we’re just innately smarter, more imaginative, more hard-working and more willing to take high-stakes risks than the rest. But to me it seems pretty clear that we’re more successful because we’re uniquely unethical. I personally believe that has to do with Protestantism, but I’m certainly open to other explanations.
EDI can be bad for your health! In this internal document from the @Royal_College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, there is a proposal from the EDI group to prioritize social justice over medical expertise. This is bonkers.
A new model of CANMEDS would seek to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice rather than medical expertise, they say.
Relationships rather than the individual physician as a gatekeeper of professional knowledge, they say.
It seems unlikely that anyone in a position to act on this will pay any attention to it, but still, you have to wonder how people manage to be so absurd and stupid and lost in the fog.
My laptop dropped dead late last night so I dashed out and got a new one this morning and it’s clearly going to be WEEKS before I get used to all its novelties. Just so you know. Posts will probably be sparse for a bit. But I haven’t vanished off the planet yet.
Generally, US Hate Crime laws work very well, to the extent that they’re applied as written. It can be easily understood that, for instance, vandalism is one thing (a nuisance property crime), but a swastika on the side of a Jewish cultural center is another (an active threat, meant to cause fear to a segment of the community). Similarly, a violent attack to gain the victim’s wallet, and an equally violent attack against a person solely because of his skin color are different beasts–again, the latter is deliberately meant to terrorize not only the victim, but also any others sharing his skin color in that neighborhood. More victims = bigger crime. (Elliot Rodger was a clear-cut example of a hate crime against women, as another example. He wasn’t shooting just to express social frustration, but to actively create a fear-response in women who say no to sex with men.)
So in the US, hate crime laws seek to regard bias as a modifier to the punishment criteria of an actual crime. No actual crime, no ‘hate crime’.
There’s two main issues that come up.
First off, women are notoriously under-represented in hate-crime legislation, and even in places where the law does recognize them as a protected class, prosecutors are unwilling to pursue crimes against women-for-being-women as hate crimes. There are plenty of cases of rape, in particular, where the perpetrator is clearly acting out of not merely a desire to sexually dominate a single woman, but rather to ‘put women in their place’. Serial rapists should almost always get hate-crime kickers, for instance.
The second issue (again, in the US) isn’t so much with law, as with law-like codes (such as university policies) that seek to treat the opinion and the deed as not merely morally/ethically equivalent, but also as ‘legally’ equivalent. This is vastly more shaky ground, and prone to both abuse (targeting someone whose speech isn’t anywhere near actual attempts to provoke violence) and lopsided approaches (look at social media policies that punish anti-trans-idology speech with rabid fervor, but look the other way at straight-up rape threats against women).
Germany has a historical/cultural reason for wanting to keep the lid on speech, and other European nations often seem to want to follow suit. But it’s still a huge risk to civil liberties to cross that line.
Fox News’s incessant focus on “critical race theory” (CRT) over the past few years — a term derived from an academic discipline that has been inflated to cover a wide range of race-focused issues — has evolved along with the discourse to focus on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI). The thrust of each, in the presentation of Fox News and its allies, is that the toxic left is seeking to divide the United States by race.
Critical Race Theory is not the same thing as Diversity Equity Inclusion. Yes the same brand of excitable zealot is often enamored of both of them, but all the same they don’t go together like sugar & spice or bread & butter.
I’m tired of seeing the epithet CRT/DEI thrown around, and I might even decide to banish it, the way a certain “website”-haver banished the word “blog” from his blog.
Republicans are as likely or more likely to say that Whites face discrimination in the United States than they are to say that gay or Black people do. The idea that Whites are a target of discrimination was a potent contributor to Donald Trump’s support in 2016.
That sentiment, stoked by Trump, Fox News and others, was an outgrowth of the surge in attention paid to immigration and race in 2014 and to increased awareness of the country’s changing demography, as illustrated above. The election of Barack Obama was an immediate presentation of that change: a young non-White guy taking power.
A young non-White guy who is vastly more intelligent and eloquent than the loudmouth from Queens. That’s the part that really burns Trump and the Foxers. How dare he?? How dare he be so good at thinking on his feet, be a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, be slim instead of bloated? Does not compute; must be blamed on crtdei and her evil plots.
Trump grudgingly left office, and a new administration — one sympathetic to racial justice arguments — took power. The right had a wonderful new foil. Discussions of “critical race theory” blossomed on the right generally and on Fox News specifically.
Again, the criticisms of CRT were not about CRT as such but of an intentionally constructed caricature of CRT aimed at tying together a wide (and often cherry-picked) array of race-tangential issues as useful targets. Like “woke,” “CRT” came to mean a vague sense of race- or diversity-related things and, therefore, bad things.
Well it’s kind of futile (as well as intrusive and dictatorial and so on) to pass laws against hatred. How would you enforce them? How would you know when they’d been broken?
Ireland’s prime minister pledged to modernise laws against hatred in the coming weeks after 34 people were arrested for rioting in Dublin on Thursday night.
Modern or medieval, they’re still futile.
“We will pass new laws in the coming weeks to enable the Gardai (police) to make better use of the CCTV evidence they collected yesterday, and also we will modernise our laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general,” Varadkar told a news conference on Friday.
Incitement is one thing and hatred is another.
There are other things we can do about hatred, after all. We can attempt to persuade against it. We can make arguments. We can talk about consequences. We can lecture, scold, preach, satirize, whine, mock – we can tell stories, paint pictures, write books, make arguments.
But force isn’t going to work, because there’s no solid surface we can find and then push.
Tens of thousands of people have marched through central London at a demonstration against antisemitism. Organisers estimated 60,000 took part in the first march of its kind since the Israel-Gaza war began, including former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Er, make that “Organisers estimated 60,000 took part in the march, including former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. It was the first march of its kind since the Israel-Gaza war began.”
The rally comes amid a steep rise in hate crime, especially against the capital’s Jewish community. English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson – who was asked not to attend by organisers – was removed by police.
But Tommy Robinson is a member of the English Defence community, so doesn’t that change everything? In other words I wish the BBC would stop using the word “community” that way. It never will but I wish it would. If Jews are a community then anti-Semites are a community. Being in a notional “community” of this kind isn’t an automatic badge of virtue.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism estimate Sunday’s march to be the largest gathering of its kind since the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when British Union of Fascists supporters were stopped from marching through east London, an area with a high Jewish population at the time.
Hey hey hey that’s the community of British Union of Fascist supporters to you.
Crimes against Jewish people motivated by racism have increased dramatically since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza conflict. There were 554 reports of antisemitic offences in London between 1 October and 1 November in London, compared with 44 in the same period last year.
The Labour MP Rosie Duffield is being investigated by her party for liking a tweet which it claims is antisemitic, but allies fear she is being targeted because of her views on transgender issues.
Allies can see she’s being targeted. The “antisemitic tweet” claim is utterly ludicrous. But also – the Times? Even the Times??
She was branded transphobic for “knowing that only women have a cervix” and campaign[ing] against people with male genitalia who identify as women being allowed to enter female-only spaces such as changing rooms.
Excuse me? Since when does the Times say “people with male genitalia” when it means “men”? Since when does the Times substitute the ridiculous “”people with male genitalia” for the quick easy and simple word “men”? And if it’s going to do that why doesn’t it say “people with male genitalia who identify as people with female genitalia”? In short has it lost its fucking mind?
Labour investigated her for liking a tweet. Nothing is too petty to punish and abuse women for.
He was responding to a tweet by the comedian Eddie Izzard who wrote: “I’m a trans superhero — but if I’d lived in Nazi Germany I’d have been murdered for it.”
Linehan responded: “Ah, yes, the Nazis, famously bigoted against straight white men with blonde hair.” Duffield liked Linehan’s response, which immediately triggered a furious backlash led by LGBT Labour, a campaign group, and Ash Sarkar, a contributing editor at the left-wing media platform Novara Media.
Sarkar tweeted to her 400,000-plus followers: “This is Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP, liking a tweet that contains Holocaust revisionism. Trans people and gay people were sent to die in concentration camps by the Nazis. This is a historical fact, and it is disgusting that a sitting Labour MP would approve of its denial.”
It definitely makes sense to trust Ash Sarkar on this subject when she’s confusing concentration camps with death camps.
Within days of liking the tweet, Duffield, who is a vice-chairwoman of the all-party parliamentary group on antisemitism, was asked to “unlike” it by her whip, Chris Elmore.
She is understood to have agreed to the request, while continuing to deny the tweet was antisemitic, explaining that Linehan had been sarcastically mocking Izzard’s comment identifying with the victims of the genocide of Jews, despite belonging to none of the identities targeted by the Nazis.
That kind of thing is normally condemned as “appropriation” by trendies like Sarkar, but I guess when an opportunistic “trans” person does it it’s brave n stunning. Also of course the Jews. I mean…you know…were they really the victims here? Shouldn’t we be centering all the martyred trans women instead?
Rose as a character isn’t simply put there to make up a quota, Doctor Who thought her identity is worth celebrating – her being who she is literally saves the world.
Sounds like a plausible plotline.
Doctor Who has always had a massive queer fanbase; it has always been progressive, and showrunner Russell already had a quote ready for the people who predictably will have an issue over this.
Speaking at a press event ahead of the episode airing, he said he knew there were some people ‘full of absolute hate, and venom, and destruction and violence who would like to see that sort of thing wiped off the screen entirely.’
Oh yes, that’s us, full of absolute hate, and venom, and destruction and violence. We’ve killed several billion people already.
And to anyone who held those ideals, he declared: ‘Shame on you and good luck to you in your lonely lives.’
What ideals? Hate, and venom, and destruction and violence? No other values are mentioned; that sentence follows immediately on the string of insults. Also “Shame on you and good luck to you” is a bit silly. Make up your mind.
In short it’s a deeply stupid piece; I’d even call it trashy. Trans ideology is undeniably popular but it doesn’t seem to attract the sharpest minds.
Donald Trump’s talk of punishing his critics and seeking to “weaponize” the US justice department against his political opponents has experts and former DoJ officials warning he poses a direct threat to the rule of law and democracy in the US.
Trump’s talk of seeking “retribution” against foes, including some he has branded “vermin”, has coincided with plans that Maga loyalists at rightwing thinktanks are assembling to expand the president’s power and curb the DoJ, the FBI and other federal agencies. All of it has fueled critics’ fears that in a second term Trump would govern as an unprecedentedly authoritarian American leader.
And a second term is looking way too likely.
Trump’s angry mindset was revealed on Veterans Day when he denigrated foes as “vermin” who needed to be “rooted out”, echoing fascist rhetoric from Italy and Germany in the 1930s.
“I’m hard-pressed to find any candidates anywhere who are so open that they would use the power of the state to go after critics and enemies,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor and co-author of How Democracies Die.
“This is one of the most openly authoritarian campaigns I’ve ever seen. You have to go back to the far-right authoritarians in the 1930s in Europe or in 1970s Latin America to find the kind of dehumanizing and violent language that Trump is starting to consistently use.”
I’m pretty sure it’s THE most authoritarian campaign for this particular country.
“US, democratic institutions are hard to kill,” noted Levitsky. “But Trump and people around him are better prepared this time. Trump learned he needs to purge and pack an administration with his loyalists.
“Autocrats have to take state institutions and pack them. Trump has learned from experience which makes him more dangerous.”
…
One ominous plan Project 2025 has been weighing would allow Trump to invoke the 1871 Insurrection Act on his first day in office, greenlighting using military forces against political foes and demonstrators protesting a new term for Trump, according to the Washington Post.
Jeffrey Clark, the former DoJ official who schemed with Trump about ways to overturn his loss in Georgia and other states and who the Fulton county district attorney has indicted along with Trump and 17 others, has been “leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025”, the Post has reported.
Many feminist organizations rushed to express support for the Palestinian cause while eliding the plight of Israeli victims. The organization UN Women issued a four-page report last month exclusively addressing the impact of the war on women and girls in Gaza but made only a brief condemnation of the Oct. 7 attack that made no mention of the sexual violence that had been reported. A group of prominent scholars circulated a letter under the title “Feminists for a Free Palestine,” without explicitly condemning the sexual violence against Israeli women.
So some women deserve it? War crimes are not war crimes if you hate the victims? If that’s the case then there are no war crimes. because there are always plenty of people who hate the victims. That’s how wars work.
College campus groups have furnished other examples, such as the women’s students’ groups at Harvard that signed on to a letter holding Israel entirely responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks or the (now-former) director of the University of Alberta’s Sexual Assault Center’s signing on to a letter doubting the veracity of accounts of Israeli rape survivors.
It’s not a book advocating genocide, or torture, or apartheid, or rape, or colonialist exploitation, or slavery, or racism, or sadism, or eating babies, or speeding up global warming, or burning down the Blue Mosque or the Forbidden City or the Sydney Opera House. And yet…
I’m sure this couldn’t be the case as that would mean the staff at @WaterstonesMorp are discriminating against me on the basis of my legally protected beliefs. pic.twitter.com/QsJPa4D9I4
As a royal author, I have come across plentiful examples of royal greed. It is standard practice for the royals to seek to minimise their personal expenditure while maximising their income from other sources, normally the public purse.
I think by “minimise their personal expenditure” he means not “spend less” but “spend other people’s money.”
But the revelation that King Charles III’s personal slush fund, the Duchy of Lancaster, is having its already bulging coffers augmented by the estates of people who die in parts of England with historical links to the royal estate plumbs new depths of disgusting avarice.
Like many so-called traditions, the feudal hangover that is bona vacantiashould have been consigned to the dustbin of history centuries ago, but it has been all too tempting for successive royals to preserve this royal fruit machine that pays out again and again. Over the past 10 years, it has collected more than £60m.
Well if we went around consigning feudal hangovers to the dustbin of history where would that leave Choss Windsor?
Under this system, the Duchy of Cornwall, owned by Prince William, can claim the assets of people who die in Cornwall intestate – without a will – if no relatives can be found. Charles’s Duchy of Lancaster does the same when their last known residence is within what was historically known as Lancashire county palatine.
“Cornwall for me, Dad, and Lancs for you.”
George VI did very well out of the loyal servicemen who died serving their country in the second world war, who originated from within the confines of the duchy and had no will. “For king and country” took on a whole new meaning.
As disquiet about the practice of bona vacantia grew after the war, the royals announced that moneys collected would henceforth be given to charity – after processing costs had been deducted, of course.
But only then, eh? “All right all right if you’re going to make such a big fuss about all this free money we get for existing.”
Yet a Guardian investigation now reveals that matters are even worse than we have been led to believe. Put bluntly, we have been lied to. Moneys we all thought were going to charity have instead been used to improve properties owned by the duchy, increasing the income stream that flows from them into Charles’s pockets.
We have the most expensive monarchy in Europe by far in terms of state support, and one that benefits from unique tax treatment available to nobody else. No inheritance tax is paid. The so-called private estates of the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster are not private enough to pay corporation tax or capital gains tax. Even income tax is only paid voluntarily – if it all – no receipts have ever been made public.
The civil list, which in 2011 gave the royals £7.9m a year, was replaced, after palace lobbying, with the sovereign grant, which 12 years later is up to £86m a year.
Over the centuries, the royals have continually bleated poverty and demanded more money from the taxpayer, while at the same time refusing point blank to reveal the extent of their accumulated wealth.
And they’re still doing their best to hide the extent of their wealth. Choss didn’t tell us about this bona vacantia wheeze himself, you’ll notice.
Unlike their forebears, contemporary billionaires do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest colony on the moon. In contrast, however avaricious, the titans of past gilded eras still saw themselves as human members of civil society. Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension. Unlike their forebears, they do not hope to build the biggest house in town, but the biggest underground lair in New Zealand, colony on the moon or Mars or virtual reality server in the cloud.
…
To escape “near-term” problems such as poverty and pollution, Jeff Bezos imagines building millions of space colonies housing trillions of people on the moon, asteroids and in other parts of the solar system, where inhabitants will harvest the resources of space for themselves and those left back on Earth. Elon Musk is convinced he will build a city of a million people on Mars by 2050 at a cost of up to $10bn a person.
Ffs. Multiply all the engineering it took to get the Mars Rover up there and working by eleventy trillion and get ‘er done in under 3 decades? Come on.
On the 7th of October we all saw the evidence before our own eyes that rape & brutalisation was inflicted on women by Hamas, and it’s taken ‘UN Women’ till almost December to say it ‘alarmed’ them.
There is a major problem within these organisations, and it must be addressed. https://t.co/9Vz7xrf5lq
As an Irish citizen who was born abroad and moved here over twenty-three years ago, I’ve seen the growth of the population and it really hasn’t been a problem for anyone except the racists and xenophobes, who would object to any immigration whatsoever. The total population is still little more than half what it was before the mass emigration due to the potato blight and subsequent deliberate starvation of the Irish people; Irish people still emigrate to other countries in large numbers.
The population of Ireland during the 2002 census (near enough twenty years ago) was 3,858,495. That same year, there were over half a million Irish-born people living in the UK. Also, thanks to the great number of Irish who moved to Britain during the famine and subsequently, it is estimated by some that there could be more than five million British-born people with at least one Irish grandparent, which would entitle them to automatic Irish citizenship. My mother is one – three of her grandparents were Irish.
The population in 2022 (the latest year for which the figure is available) was 5,123,536, an increase of 1,265,041, or about 33%, over the previous figure.
From the 2022 census page:
The question on nationality changed in Census 2022 to capture information on country of citizenship. This change may have impacted comparisons with previous census data.
84% of the population hold sole Irish citizenship, or (as I do) dual citizenship. For census purposes, both are counted as Irish. Twenty percent of the resident population were born abroad, but that includes those who are Irish citizens (such as offspring of Irish emigrants who returned to Ireland); only 12% of the population have citizenship of a different country, and no Irish citizenship.
Another day, another virtue signaller standing by their ‘trans siblings’ and taking a pop at feminists. Sandi Toksvig, she of the unfunny Radio 4 shows more recently known for her involvement in the Women’s Equality Party (WEP) – has denounced feminists who are ‘anti trans’.
Toksvig says she’s been an activist all her life, but Julie is not convinced.
When feminists were battling to set up single sex services to support women that had experienced rape and domestic violence, was she there? Was Tokvsig on the feminist frontline in the 1960s and 1970s? If so, what did she achieve? If not, perhaps she should pipe down about those feminists who were present, instead of berating us for being trans exclusionary.
Rather than aiming her fire at women, Toksvig needs to realise there are important battles still to be won. Even today, lesbians are lectured by some for excluding men who identify as women from our dating pool. Such attitudes are a rerun of old misogynistic times, but with a progressive spin. Toksvig should surely understand how distressing it is for lesbians to be told we are not valid unless we include a penis in our relationship.
Maybe Toksvig thinks a penis that belongs to a trans woman isn’t a penis at all.
Perhaps Toksvig felt the need to speak out because she has seen what has happened to lesbians such as myself, Kathleen Stock, and numerous others when we pushed back against gender ideology? Whatever her reason for adding fuel to the misogynistic fire currently raging, it is cowardly, craven, and deeply disrespectful of those women that have fought for the rights that she enjoys. ‘Radical feminists’ like me will not be rebuked by someone who spends time attacking us – instead of concentrating on fighting for the rights of women.
The Twitter Trans Guard is raging at Julie for being such a big meany to that nice incloooosive Sandy Toksvig.
DELIVEROO DRIVER CAIO Benicio was on his motorbike this afternoon, on a job, when he saw a man with a knife attacking a young girl on Parnell Square East.
Immediately, the 43-year-old Brazilian dismounted his bike, took off his helmet, and hit the attacker with it.
“I didn’t even make a decision, it was pure instinct, and it was all over in seconds. He fell to the ground, I didn’t see where knife went, and other people stepped in,” he told The Journal tonight.
So immigrants aren’t all demonic?
Now Benicio is exhausted – all day he has been running on adrenaline. He doesn’t know where his bike is as he left it at the scene inside of the Garda cordon. However, he’s not worried about it; he’s worried about the victims.
“I remember it all in flashes now. It was over in seconds it seemed,” he said.
Benicio came to Ireland for work after his restaurant burned down in Brazil. He hopes his children can come here one day.
He was saddened to see the chaos on Dublin’s streets tonight – with anti-immigrant sentiments being expressed by rioters and far-right actors.
“It looks like they hate immigrants. Well I am an immigrant, and I did what I could to try and save that little girl,” he said.
