And then there’s China-Japan.

Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato’s 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years.

But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one.

“I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre,” he said, referring to the Japanese army’s six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped.

…

For China, Japan’s brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound.

What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves “comfort women” – the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation.

Of course in a sense Japan can’t really own up, because the people of contemporary Japan aren’t the perpetrators. Once enough time has passed it becomes impossible to get justice in the sense of accountability from the people responsible.

Human history must be full of such horrors, that can never be apologized for or forgiven because the perps are long gone.

It’s not easy being the National Library of Scotland.

Scotland’s national library has been accused of “cowardice” after removing a bestselling gender-critical book from a major exhibition following staff complaints.

The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, co-edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, features more than 30 essays from contributors including JK Rowling, former MP Joanna Cherry KC, MSP Ash Regan, and former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss.

It charts a five-year campaign opposing Nicola Sturgeon’s bid to reform Scotland’s gender recognition laws to allow so-called self-ID law.

Well not “reform” so much as “change” – because “reform” implies improve.

The collection received four public nominations for the National Library of Scotland’s Dear Library exhibition, twice the number usually needed to guarantee inclusion in the 200-title display, which opened in June to mark the library’s centenary.

Then that’s why. Two is the right number; more than two is just greedy.

[D]ocuments released under Freedom of Information reveal the library’s LGBT+ staff network raised concerns at a meeting with managers on May 7, later warning that the book carried “significant risks” to relationships with authors and stakeholders and could cause “severe harm” to staff.

They claimed it promoted “hate speech” comparable to racism.

Ah but you see it’s not comparable to racism. That’s where the ideology gets it so very very very wrong. It’s not like racism at all. Men pretending to be women is not like Medgar Evers attending the University of Mississippi (and being murdered for it). India Willoughby is not comparable to Fannie Lou Hamer. Men being told they can’t barge into women’s toilets is not like the murder of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

On May 14, the network was told the book would be included, with “safeguarding measures” in place. An internal note described it as “a book that calls for exclusion of a section of society” and asked whether calling it “divisive” would “minimise the harm” of including it.

That’s a lie though. Knowing and saying that men are not women is not a form of cruel/unwarranted/phobic exclusion, just as it’s not “exclusionary” to say that potatoes are not lemons or bicycles are not airplanes. We’re allowed to know the differences between things, and in fact we have to know them in order to function. If we refuse to know differences we’ll be eating dog shit and throwing away ice cream. Knowing the difference between women and men is very literally how we got here. Without it? No humans at all.

In a letter to Ms Shah, Ms Dalgety and Dr Hunter-Blackburn said: “The material disclosed makes clear that you, and some of your senior colleagues, allowed activists on your staff to characterise the very existence of the book as harmful, hateful and akin to racism and homophobia. By conceding to this internal lobbying, not only have you allowed this defamatory misrepresentation to go unchallenged, but you have in effect endorsed it.”

And you are a library.

Ms Dalgety and Ms Hunter Blackburn called for Ms Shah and chair of the Library, Sir Drummond Bone, to meet them and explain “why our book was deemed too harmful to the Library to be treated like any other”. Ms Cherry said she was “appalled” the library had “bowed to pressure from a small group within their staff to censor a book written by feminists, sex abuse survivors and lesbians, about their experiences during an important period in Scottish recent history”.

Bathgate and Linlithgow MP Kirsteen Sullivan tweeted: “Absolutely ridiculous – censoring a book that gives detailed accounts of women who have been unjustly censored!  I’ve had my copy since day one – if you’ve still to read it, now’s the time to buy!”

I suppose this will sell more copies. Always look on the bright side of life.

It turns out the disheveled person in a T shirt who (incorrectly) told us it was not true that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheest was censored is not a random intern or even a junior reporter at The National; she is the editor.

She’s the editor and she’s casual about the truth. Not a good look, even before we talk about the T shirt.

Remember this from…uhh…yesterday?

Scotland’s national library banned a book about feminists’ fight against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID law after staff complained its contents were “hate speech” comparable to racism.

The National Library of Scotland (NLS) has been accused of a “shameful” capitulation to censorship after it emerged that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by gender-critical women, had been cut from a major exhibition celebrating the institution’s centenary.

Now we’re told it was all lies, lies lies lies I tell you!

Check out what the slob in the T shirt has to say, because she’s remarkably annoying.

You may have heard that a gender critical book has been “banned” from an exhibition by the National Library of Scotland. Well, it hasn’t.

Uh…yes it has.

She goes on to say people can still read it, but that does not alter the fact that it was withdrawn from the exhibit because fanatics pitched a fit. It was, indeed, withdrawn from the exhibit.

It’s really quite a brazen lie.

Exclusive: Medical journal rejects Kennedy’s call for retraction of vaccine study

Aug 11 (Reuters) – An influential U.S. medical journal is rejecting a call from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to retract a large Danish study that found that aluminum ingredients in vaccines do not increase health risks for children, the journal’s editor told Reuters.

That’s the US Health Secretary.

He has no medical training of any kind, nor does he have any upper level science education. He’s a random crank with a famous name. If you’re a random crank with a famous name you can set about endangering the lives of a huge population and get away with it.

Kennedy has long promoted doubts about vaccines’ safety and efficacy, and as health secretary has upended the federal government’s process for recommending immunization. A recent media report said he has been considering whether to initiate a review of shots that contain aluminum, which he says are linked to autoimmune diseases and allergies.

He says a lot of things. He knows nothing.

The study, opens new tab, which was funded by the Danish government and published in July in the Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed nationwide registry data for more than 1.2 million children over more than two decades. It did not find evidence that exposure to aluminum in vaccines had caused an increased risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders.

The work is by far the best available evidence on the question of the safety of aluminum in vaccines, said Adam Finn, a childhood vaccination expert in the UK and pediatrician at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the study.

So Kennedy says nope and throws it in the trash.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Why not indeed?

I don’t think we’re really seeing a wave of trans suicides in Scotland. But it’s plausible that some people with trans identities may commit suicide as they reckon with the new reality, which is that their invented identities are not going to be accepted across society and law.

People with transgender identities are typically already in very poor mental health, and the suicide rate has always been high with that group. I have a lot of sympathy for such troubled people, especially the ones who were misled into doing irreversible damage to their bodies. Some of them surely will end up dead. I’m obviously far less sympathetic to the chancers — the straight men who invaded women’s spaces just because they could get away with it.

But the inevitable burdens on mentally ill people with trans identities that will result from rolling back trans entitlements are not a sign that “terfs” are evil; they’re a sign that the transgender subculture should never have gotten this far out of hand in the first place. The trans movement is dependent on a cultural ecosystem that perpetually reinforces the lie that “gender affirming” body modifications are good and necessary, rather than harmful and entirely unnecessary. The irreversibility of such procedures serves as a kind of cultural blackmail to keep the system going: on some level, almost everybody knows it’s a big lie and that “sex changes” don’t remotely work as advertised. But consciously or not, what they’re really thinking is: What are we gonna do with the people it’s aready been done to? Let’s just keep letting it happen so that we don’t have to reckon with them. The fact that they’re already mentally vulnerable, plus the fact that so many of them have already had irreversible procedures, plus plus the fact that the activists are shouting that it’s helping people (despite all evidence showing it clearly isn’t)… This gives people a sense that doing the right thing isn’t worth the trouble.

(There are some parallels with the medical profession’s complicity in the practice of FGM in Northeast Africa.)

You could say the same about any unhealthy situation that society needs to roll back: the people already caught up in it are going to face some hardship. Phasing out tobacco with sin taxes puts a burden on nicotine addicts, but we can’t just keep letting more and more people die of lung cancer. Phasing out coal negatively affects West Virginians and rural Pennsylvanians, but we can’t just keep on cooking the planet. Heroin addicts struggled after it was banned in the 1920s. On and on…

The Guardian claims:

Caz Coronel was standing in the queue for the ladies’ at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank when she registered a male voice shouting across the vestibule: “The men’s toilets are on this side!”

At first the composer and producer paid little attention, until the man – whom Coronel describes as tall and in his late 60s – approached and touched her shoulder. He continued to challenge her about being in the wrong queue until she asked him bluntly: “Do you want to see my tits?”

Really? Did that really happen?

It doesn’t sound very plausible. Two queues outside the rooms where the toilets are, and a guy shouts from one queue to the other queue? I know, we’re supposed to think he’s a fanatic and so he does this peculiar thing that no one would normally ever do, but I still think it sounds…how shall I put this…made up.

Since the supreme court’s ruling on biological sex, debate around its practical application has focused heavily on access to women’s toilet and changing facilities – in particular after initial advice on implementation from the equalities watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, amounted to a blanket ban on trans people using toilets of their lived gender, which many say in effect excludes them from public spaces.

Ah their “lived gender” – is that what we’re calling it now? There’s your actual gender and then there’s your lived gender? Does that work for other categories? Can we have a lived species that’s different from our actual one? Can we have a lived age? A lived height? A lived pedality?

Critics of the ruling have suggested it may likewise affect cis women who do not adhere to a straight, white template of femininity.

Critics of the ruling have suggested a slew of stupid things; that doesn’t mean the Guardian has to wring its silly hands over them.

Support groups report some early indications that gender nonconforming women are facing increased challenges, raising wider questions about how women read each other’s bodies and whether women’s toilets have ever been entirely safe spaces.

Therefore it’s fine for men to be in women’s toilets. Brilliant thinking, Libby Brooks.

Claire Prihartini was diagnosed with breast cancer a year and a half ago. “I had a really lucky experience: I found out early, opted for a bilateral mastectomy and didn’t need further treatment.” Her chest is now flat, with two small scars and no nipples.

In May, Prihartini was in the women’s changing room area of her local pool. “I was standing with my top off in front of the mirror putting on my swimming cap. Another woman walked in, gasped audibly and said: ‘There’s a man in here!’ I said: ‘Oh I’m not a man …’ in a friendly way, then she said aggressively: ‘You look like a man, there aren’t meant to be men in here’ and continued to look at my body. I didn’t want to engage with her any further so I just walked off into the pool.”

You’ll never guess who she is. Not in a million years.

Prihartini, whose experience was first shared on social media by her husband, Jolyon Maugham, founder of the Good Law Project, is at pains to make clear that this was not “a massively traumatic experience”. After she walked away the other woman did not continue to challenge her. Like Coronel, however, she links the incident directly to the supreme court ruling.

Does she now. Why not link it to the past ten years of relentless bullying of women who don’t want men joining us in the toilets? Why not link it to the problem rather than the solution?

Peak academic authoritative credible evidence-based verificationality. Five stars.

Deal with the substance, damn you! I was speaking to an expert!! Who made!!! The comment!!!! To me!!!!!!

So it was Pete Hegseth who put that loony Idaho women-are-cattle god-pest in the spotlight.

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, recently shared a video in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote, prompting one progressive evangelical organization to express concern.

Hegseth reposted a CNN segment on X on Thursday that focuses on pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who co-founded the Idaho-based Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), In the segment, he raises the idea of women not voting.

“I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” Wilson said.

And by “Christian” he means women-subordinating. He would like to see this nation being a nation that treats female people as inferior and subordinate. How cuddly.

Another pastor interview by CNN for its segment, Toby Sumpter, said: “In my ideal society, we would vote as households. I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”

A congregant interviewed for the segment remarked that she considers her husband as the head their household, and added: “I do submit to him.”

Hegseth reposted the nearly seven-minute report with the caption: “All of Christ for All of Life.”

It was bad enough on its own. Knowing it was about the Fox News Secretary of Defense makes it quite a lot worse.

Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed

On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

Now that is an interesting question. My bet is that nothing good happens.

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.

The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.

Knowing how to think for yourself, for one thing.

To be fair, I don’t think I think social pressure–>conformity is always a bad thing. Social pressure to give up the little hatreds it’s so easy to pick up from being around other people can be a not-bad thing. Racism used to be entirely taken for granted in the US, and social pressure was necessary to break through [some of] that.

Of course the trans ideologues think that’s what they’re doing – breaking through a bad stupid destructive prejudice that has no foundation in reality. But they’re wrong.

To test the gap between expression and belief, we used gender discourse — a contentious topic both highly visible and ideologically loaded. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex. Eighty-seven percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of gender. Nine percent expressed partial openness to gender fluidity. Just seven percent embraced the idea of gender as a broad spectrum, and most of these belonged to activist circles.

Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. Thirty-eight percent described themselves as “morally confused,” uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant exclusion.

Fascinating. 77 percent are gender sane but would never say so aloud.

Worth keeping in mind when the shouting starts.

Yet again the people who should know better collapse like melting butter because the teenagers might pitch a fit.

Scotland’s national library banned a book about feminists’ fight against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID law after staff complained its contents were “hate speech” comparable to racism.

The National Library of Scotland (NLS) has been accused of a “shameful” capitulation to censorship after it emerged that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by gender-critical women, had been cut from a major exhibition celebrating the institution’s centenary.

Yay centenary no not you.

Members of the public had been asked by the library, which promotes itself as a national forum for “ideas, debate and discussion”, to nominate books which had shaped their lives for inclusion in a ten-month public display intended as a “love letter” to the power of reading.

However, despite The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht receiving double the number of nominations necessary to guarantee inclusion in the Dear Library public display, Amina Shah, Scotland’s national librarian and the NLS chief executive, decided not to include the book after a staff backlash.

Because women must not be allowed to say men are not women, and if they do somehow get away with saying it somewhere, the saying must be hastily and thoroughly disavowed and concealed. This is a tribute to the power of reading.

Documents seen by The Times show a major row broke out at the national library in which some workers repeatedly lobbied for the removal of the critically acclaimed collection of essays, edited by the policy analyst Lucy Hunter Blackburn and the newspaper columnist Susan Dalgety and including a contribution by JK Rowling.

Repeatedly lobbied for the removal why? Because people must not be free to say that men are not women.

Shah ultimately decided not to include the book due to concerns about “the potential impact on key stakeholders” who she feared could “withdraw support for the exhibition and the centenary”.

Dalgety and Hunter Blackburn said it had been “devastating” to learn that their book had been “censored in this cowardly and anti-democratic way by our national library”.

In a letter to Shah, they have called for the decision to be reversed, and for a meeting so that she can explain to them in person why they [she] had allowed their work to be treated as a “dangerous object” rather than an account of a significant period in Scottish political history.

“But this is about more than the book,” they added. “This is the legacy of a decade of political leadership which has demonised and delegitimised people who refused to conform to the approved narrative on sex and gender identity.

“The material released also lifts the lid on the network of discrimination and censorship which operates across Scotland’s public institutions with impunity through staff networks and other activist groups, enabled by weak leadership.”

So much for “Scotland the Brave” eh what?

The public exhibition, which began in June and runs until April next year at the library’s headquarters on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh, includes anti-censorship and pro-democracy imagery, something Hunter Blackburn and Dalgety said “adds to the insult”.

The pair, whose work became a Sunday Times bestseller, were also refused a platform at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year.

Jenny Niven, the festival’s director, said the subject of gender was “extremely divisive” and claimed events about it could be seen as “spectacle or sport” in which people’s identity was seen as “subject of debate”.

But if “people’s identity” is wholly fictitious yet treated as sacred and binding, then it should be a subject of debate. “Identity” is like The Prophet in being anxiously and/or violently sealed off from question and dissent. The more idenniny is treated as sacred and undiscussable, the more it needs discussing.

Cherry said: “I am appalled that the National Library of Scotland has bowed to pressure from a small group within their staff to censor a book written by feminists, sex abuse survivors and lesbians, about their experiences during an important period in Scottish recent history.”

Yeah well, women just don’t matter. We’re too boring to matter. A man who calls himself a woman is both saintly and fascinating, but a plain old common or garden woman is the most boring object on the planet.

Hmmmm, which team was it who made the debate toxic?

Nicola Sturgeon has reignited her feud with JK Rowling by blaming the author for creating a toxic debate over trans rights and stoking “vile” attacks which left her fearing for her physical safety.

So Sturgeon is saying Rowling created the debate “over trans rights”?

But that’s absurd, because Sturgeon had already staked out a position on “trans rights” long before Rowling said a word about the subject.

In her memoir Frankly, the former first minister claims the Harry Potter writer wearing a T-shirt branding her a “destroyer of women’s rights” was a turning point in which “rational debate” on the trans issue became “impossible” and “any hope of finding common ground disappeared”.

Frankly, I think it was Sturgeon’s insistence that men can be women that made rational debate impossible. I also think that insistence is indeed lethal for women’s rights. How can it not be? How can women have rights if any man who feels like it can bounce up and say he’s a woman so give him the job as CEO of the rape crisis center?

The author posted the image as a show of “solidarity” with a protest organised by the For Women Scotland campaign group that day against Sturgeon’s gender reforms, which were then making their way through Holyrood.

But of course from women’s point of view they’re not reforms, they’re an attack on women’s rights, hence the T-shirt.

In her long-awaited memoir, which is was due to be published on Thursday but which went on sale in some book shops on Monday, Sturgeon reveals she now wishes she had “hit the pause button” over the legislation, which was passed within three months of Rowling’s attack and was later blocked by the UK government.

The pause button?

Legislation that demolishes human rights for half the population isn’t ok if we just wait a month or two. Pausing a misogynist law is not enough.

She goes on to claim that there are “few issues” more important to her than protecting and advancing women’s rights, “so to hear myself described as a destroyer of them wounds me deeply.”

Well tough shit, because that’s what you are. Think more about the injuries you’ve done to women. Think about the Edinburgh rape crisis center. Think about it. Never mind you, never mind your ego; think about the consequences.

In Frankly, Sturgeon states that while political opposition to her reforms were growing in 2022 and that campaigners’ anger was “bordering on hysteria”, she did not believe the gender issue was causing much concern among the wider public.

She admits this changed early the following year as a result of the Isla Bryson scandal — the biologically male double rapist initially placed in a female jail — and suggests she now wishes she [had] had the “courage” to admit she considers the sex offender a female.

…

In her memoir, Sturgeon admits she was “completely blindsided” by the Bryson case, which erupted within weeks of her self-ID law, which would have allowed Scots to easily change their legal gender, passing at Holyrood.

Well whose fault is that??? She had no right to be blindsided by it, because it was the whole point. If you insist that men are women if they say they are, and the state must agree with them, then Isla Brysons are inevitable. As we said. Loudly and over and over again. How did she manage to be “blindsided” after all that? Absolutely pathetic.

Sturgeon writes that the case gave her critics a “monster” who “brought vividly to life” what until then had been “abstract” concerns. The story then “went nuclear” and left her “fighting a fire that was already out of control”, Sturgeon said.

Well they fucking shouldn’t have been “abstract.” If she really considered them abstract then that’s her fault. We did explain. A billion times we explained.

She said she was then “like a rabbit in the headlights” when faced with questions over whether she considered Bryson, previously known as Adam Graham, to be male or female. At the time, Sturgeon repeatedly refused to directly answer the question.

She maintained that position in an ITV interview broadcast on Monday night to coincide with the publication of her book, but added that she now believes anyone “who commits the most heinous male crime against women probably forfeits the right to be the gender of their choice”.

There is no such right.

Sturgeon writes: “Whatever the reason, when confronted with the question ‘Is Isla Bryson a woman?’ I was like a rabbit in the headlights.

“Because I failed to answer ‘yes’, plain and simple, to the basic question, I seemed weak and evasive.

“Worst of all, I sounded like I didn’t have the courage to stand behind the logical conclusion of the self-identification system we had just legislated for.”

Whooooosh point totally missed.

You never should have legislated for that self-identification system. It’s a very bad, horrific, lethal for women system. You have something wrong with your brain.

Ah yes, convicted rapist Trump is the hero of the women-hating evangelicals.

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, recently shared a video in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote, prompting one progressive evangelical organization to express concern.

Hegseth reposted a CNN segment on X on Thursday that focuses on pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who co-founded the Idaho-based Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), In the segment, he raises the idea of women not voting.

Another pastor interview by CNN for its segment, Toby Sumpter, said: “In my ideal society, we would vote as households. I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”

A congregant interviewed for the segment remarked that she considers her husband as the head their household, and added: “I do submit to him.”

Hegseth reposted the nearly seven-minute report with the caption: “All of Christ for All of Life.”

Men have households, you see, and women are part of the staff of those households. Men are the owners and women are the servants. That’s how Mister God arranged it so who are you to do it some other blasphemous way?

Hoooo boy I cannot wait to read this.

Trump does a particularly showy version of the “Now I know this is not politically correct” move in his Monday briefing about the DC takeover.

“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness, and we’re getting rid of the slums, too. We have slums here,” Trump added, without providing details. “I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we’re getting rid of the slums where they live.”

Ah. So not not politically correct, but entirely politically correct, because we’re getting rid of where they live. What could be more politically correct than that?

Who on EARTH is dumb enough to say this in public? To, in fact, put it in writing, in a BOOK?

Who wrote that?

I rather think it was Nicola Sturgeon in her memoir.

It’s hilarious that she thinks it might make her sound “daft” as opposed to grandiose and narcissistic beyond belief.

Tantrums win again.

The Guardian:

Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of UK awards celebrating LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn from the awards over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a “Terf” – the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Two judges have also withdrawn from the prize process, and more than 800 writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. Boyne, who was longlisted for the main Polari book prize for his novella Earth, is best known for his 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

Author Nicola Dinan, who won the Polari first book prize last year for her novel Bellies, resigned from this year’s jury for the debut prize. Guardian journalist Jason Okundaye asked for his book Revolutionary Acts to be removed from this year’s first book prize longlist, while Andrew McMillan withdrew his book Pity from the longlist for the overall Polari book prize for non-debuts.

Heartstopper author Alice Oseman along with the writers Nikesh Shukla, Julia Armfield, Naoise Dolan, Seán Hewitt and Kirsty Logan are among the hundreds to have signed the statement.

“We are profoundly disappointed by the Polari prize’s decision to include John Boyne on the longlist for this year’s Polari book prize,” it reads. Boyne “has publicly and unequivocally associated himself with trans exclusionary sentiments”, it continues, citing an Irish Independent article in which Boyne expresses support for JK Rowling and describes himself as a “fellow Terf”. Boyne declined to comment.

Boyne doesn’t believe that men can be women or vice versa, and for that all these people are campaigning hard to block him from being eligible for a prize?

It’s such shameless bullying for such a contemptible reason I can hardly believe what I’m reading. He knows that people can’t change sex, therefore we inquisitors are going to make sure he cannot win this prize, and what’s more we’re going to do it in public! We think we’re fabulous!

Boyne’s “public statements on trans rights and identity are incompatible with the LGBTQ+ community’s most basic standards of inclusion”, the statement continues. “In any year, the decision to include Mr Boyne on the longlist would be, in our view, inappropriate and hurtful to the wider community of LGBTQ+ readers and writers. That the decision has been made this year – in the context of rising anti-trans hatred and systematic exclusion of trans people from public life in the UK and across the world – is inexcusable.”

What’s so special about this year? Nothing; they’re just making shit up in an attempt to sound less crazy and mean than they obviously are.

While Trump is busy harassing cities like New York and Washington, let’s read up on murder stats in states like Mississippi and Alabama.

House Republicans held three field hearings on violent crime last year in New York City, Chicago, and Washington DC. These hearings should have been held in the murder-plagued states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. In 2023, Speaker Johnson’s hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana had a murder rate 8 times higher (41.1) than Minority Leader Jeffries’ hometown of Brooklyn, New York (5.0), 6 times higher than Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco, California (6.6), and more than 7 times higher than the national average (5.5). Our 2023 report in the Red State Murder Problem series found that murder rates were significantly higher in red states than blue states every year from 2000 to 2020. Over these 21 years, the red state murder rate was 23% higher than the blue state murder rate. Our analysis of the latest CDC data found that 2021 and 2022 were no exception.

…

We found that murder rates were down 5% nationwide in 2022, but a red state murder gap still persists. Murder rates in red states were 33% higher than in blue states in both 2021 and 2022. As in 2019 and 2020, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama hold the first, second, and third highest murder rates in the country, respectively. 

Gee, what might those three states have in common?

Could it possibly be that they were and are the three deepest Deep South states, with the most profound entanglement with slavery and Jim Crow and murderous resistance to the Civil Rights movement? Could it be that the murders of Emmett Till and James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner still hang over the region like a miasma?

What happens when a child is head of state.

During the news conference, Trump spoke at length about his upcoming meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.

He says he finds it “very respectful” that the Russian president is meeting him on US soil, and he thinks the pair will have “constructive conversations” on Friday.

By finding it very respectful he of course means flattering to him personally. Not the transactional courtesy of international diplomacy but dude to dude flattery and submission. He thinks Putin is kneeling to him as opposed to dragging him around by the balls. That’s how stupid he is.

But his comments on a possible “land swap” with Ukraine might not please President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has insisted his country will not give up any land as part of a peace agreement.

Trump says there will be “some land swapping” and “some changes in land” as part of a deal. He knows this “through Russia and through conversations with everybody”.

This “land swap” will be “for the good of Ukraine”, he says. “Good stuff, not bad stuff.”

But then, perhaps less reassuringly: “Also, some bad stuff for both.”

Asked if Zelensky was invited to Friday’s meeting, Trump says Ukraine’s president “wasn’t a part of it” but that he “could go” if he wanted to.

Yes sure. Trump cuddles up to the aggressor and breezily tells us the aggressed can tag along if he wants to.

What business does Trump have meeting with Putin to decide the fate of Ukraine while excluding Ukraine?

“Probably in the first two minutes I’ll know exactly whether or not a deal can be made,” he adds. A reporter asks how he will know.

“Because that’s what I do, I make deals,” he says.

He makes real estate deals. Those are not comparable to “deals” with an aggressor head of state who invades another country with the goal of absorbing it.

Well whaddya know – it turns out you can forfeit the right to be the gender of your choice. No less an authority than Nicola Sturgeon says so!