Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • There’s no one to stop them

    Finally there is some pushback at the BBC:

    Tim Davie is facing a revolt as he is accused of letting the transgender Pride network “police” the BBC.

    Staff have told him to shut down the Pride network.

    The latest trans row to hit the broadcaster began with a testy exchange between Nathan Wren, BBC Studios Pride’s co-chair, and Malcolm Clark, a science producer, at the World Congress of Science & Factual Producers last month.  Mr Clark claims he complained that the group “policed” BBC output and stifled debate, prompting Mr Wren to reply: “We only intervene, when, say, a trans subject is being covered and then we’ll press to ensure trans voices are being heard.”

    Oh is that all.

    By the way, is there a Feminism network at the BBC? Do women get to “intervene” when a subject that affects women is being covered? If so does anyone obey the network?

    Now, the Telegraph can reveal that some staff are calling for a crackdown on the group, accusing it of being “homophobic” by eroding the sanctity of binary, immutable biological sex by promoting self-identified genders, thus undermining same-sex attracted people. 

    “Sanctity” is the wrong word entirely. It’s a matter of definitions and understanding and clarity, not one of religion.

    Is anyone accusing the group of being misogynist by obliterating the meaning of the word “woman”?

    The growing influence of the BBC Pride networks has been partly blamed as a hangover from the BBC’s long-standing ties with Stonewall, the contentious LGBT charity.

    Here again, why did Stonewall have so much clout when no feminist charity had any at all?

    Such emboldening was evident in June 2021, when leaked minutes of BBC Pride’s board showed they were demanding to “attend commissioning meetings” and play a role in “editorial processes” on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

    …

    Following the latest row over BBC Studios Pride chiefs suggesting they want more influence, a BBC insider said: “Pride believes the rights of transwomen are more important than the rights of women to single-sex spaces and sports.”

    Or anything else. Pride believes women just don’t matter at all.

    The insider claimed BBC Sport reporters were told to refer to the transwoman athlete Laurel Hubbard as a woman in the Tokyo 2021 Olympics, as an example of the effects. 

    A second BBC source said: “It’s intimidating, how much power the Pride group has on trans activist issues and there’s no one to stop them or put the counter case. “Editors don’t want to do anything to offend internal activists because they’re afraid of the inevitable argument and internal complaints that would follow. Even if they know they made the correct editorial decision. It’s all about trans, not LGB.”

    Not LGB and not women.

    H/t latsot

  • Live reporting

    The Guardian Live on events in Brasilia:

    Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro has joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call for former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s extradition from the US.

    Seriously. Boot him out.

    An hour ago:

    Brazil’s GloboNews is reporting that the country’s Congress, supreme court and presidential palace have all been retaken by security forces.

    …

    GloboNews has also shared footage of the aftermath of the attack on the palace taken by the minister of communications, Paulo Pimenta, in which he says of his office: “Look what the vandals did here! The chaos. Unbelievable. They are criminals.”

    In three blocks before that one the Guardian calls the attack “the protests,” which seems very mistaken. A coup is not a protest. An attempted coup is not a protest.

  • The mobs faced little opposition

    It’s…January 8.

    Luiz InĂĄcio Lula da Silva has ordered the federal government to take control of policing in Brazil’s capital, BrasĂ­lia, after hundreds of hardcore supporters of the former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s congress, presidential palace and supreme court.

    Gee. Our fascists missed a trick, they just stormed the congress. If only they’d thought to take on the supreme court and the White House too maybe they would have won. The White House would have welcomed them and handed over the keys.

    “What we are witnessing is a terrorist attack,” the news anchor Erick Bang announced on the GloboNews television network as word of the upheaval spread. “The three buildings have been invaded by coup-mongering terrorists.”

    Shocking video footage showed the pro-Bolsonaro militants sprinting up the ramp into the Palácio do Planalto, the presidential offices, roaming the building’s corridors and vandalising the nearby supreme court, whose windows had been smashed.

    We live in horrible times. Fascists are vying with global warming to see who can destroy everything first.

    Lula, a veteran leftist, was sworn in as Brazil’s new president last Sunday in celebrations attended by hundreds of thousands of Brazilians.

    But thousands of pro-Bolsonaro extremists have refused to accept Lula’s narrow victory in October’s election, spending recent weeks camping outside army bases across the country and calling for a military coup.

    All too familiar.

    Military police in BrasĂ­lia were conspicuous by their absence and the mobs faced little opposition as they marched towards the three branches of government.

    Lula said capital law enforcement bodies showed “incompetence, bad faith or malice” and promised swift action. He vowed to return to the capital on Sunday and visit the three buildings under attack.

    By the end of the afternoon, authorities appeared to have retaken control of some of the buildings, with GloboNews reporting 150 people had been arrested. TV footage showed dozens of people handcuffed and lying on the ground watched over by law enforcement officers.

    Reichstag. Congress. PalĂĄcio do Planalto.

    Observers have spent months warning that Bolsonaro hardliners might stage a South American version of the US’s Capitol invasion in the hope of overturning Lula’s win. During his tumultuous four-year administration, Bolsonaro repeatedly hinted that a military takeover might be in the works and battled to undermine Brazil’s internationally respected electronic voting system.

    …

    Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain whose main international ally was Trump, flew out of Brazil on the eve of Lula’s inauguration and is currently in Florida.

    Florida. Naturally.

    H/t What a Maroon

  • Kimono guy meets himself coming back

    Disturbances in the field:

    Notice that to the “sex work is work!!” crowd, all political analysis that says prostitution is a feminist issue aka bad for women aka not a human right aka exploitation is “attacking sex workers.” So unionizing auto workers and coal miners and factory workers is “attacking workers”? Makes about as much sense.

    https://twitter.com/DormanSarahx/status/1612044588801458179

    Hilarious that Jolyon thinks he doesn’t tell others what to say and think.

    You will talk about what we tell you to talk about. Or else.

    Hahahahaha it’s hilarious to watch Jolyon caught in his own trap.

  • Guest post: We’ve come to believe our own press clippings

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on They appointed an expert group.

    I strip you naked and stand you out in the savannah in front of a hungry lion, you will understand. Biology rules not only us but lions
tigers
bears
spiders
snakes
etc etc etc

    We’ve used our intelligence and technology to smooth over some of the rough edges of material existence. Unfortunately we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we’ve completely escaped all that biology stuff, and that we are beyond the jurisdiction of the rules that govern the rest of life.

    In a very short time, most of us in the West have become divorced from the basic processes that sustain the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed. Food comes from a supermarket. Electricity comes from a hole in the wall. We can get almost anything, from anywhere, delivered to our doorstep with a few clicks of a button.

    We’ve come to believe our own press clippings, and think we’re a self-made species. “Natural Selection what? Underclass who?” This ease and this ignorance has come at a price.

    In the process of creating our comfortable, insular lifestyle, we’ve degraded and destroyed the natural foundation upon which it’s all actually based. It’s now a disaster to be without electricity, or the internet. People will die without them; this is how dependent we’ve become on the civilizational sandcastle we’ve built for ourselves.

    This second order dependence masks the deeper dependencies we thought we’d left behind on the savannah. Much of what passes for wealth is completely disconnected from the physical facts of material existence, and depends on data in computers; a mighty Empire built on nothing, calling the shots. Even now, while the world burns, trillionaires-in-the-making are planning their moves; our fate is in the hands of the spiritual heirs of Ozymandius.

    But while their influence is indeed powerful, it is not supernatural. We are all on the savannah; it’s right outside the office cubicle, waiting. You’ll get by for a lot longer without a bank than you will without clean air, clean water, and food. Unfortunately, the banks have discovered that we can live (for a while at least) on dirty air, dirty water, and a bit of food, which is fine, so long as we pay our credit card bills every month, which are the only bills they think are important enough to pay.

    We’re told all the time that we shouldn’t live beyond our financial means, that we should avoid debt. (Or at least that’s what we non-billionaires are told; restraint is for you, not your betters.) Well, we as a civilization are living way beyond our physical means, overextending our “credit” against what the planet can support in anything beyond a very short term.

    In 2022, Earth Overshoot Day (“the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year”) was July 28. Anything used after that day was either from the proceeds of theft, or burning up capital. If you eat your seed corn, you have nothing to plant. This is also true if you buy, or steal your neighbour’s seed corn and eat it. At some point there’s nothing to plant and nothing to eat. Bankers seem not to have cottoned on to this concept, nor have they realized that at some point, they’re going to run out of clean air, clean water, and food. It’s all connected, and all the high-finance shenanigans in the world won’t change that.

  • You will end up moving rapists into women’s jails

    If you’re in the mood to get really angry, watch this clip:

  • To further its child safeguarding mission

    James Esses in the Spectator:

    Childline has acted as a haven for struggling children for over 35 years. In 2006, it became part of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), to further its child safeguarding mission. 

    He used to work there, and he says it’s put ideology ahead of safeguarding.

    I was a volunteer counsellor at Childline between 2015 and 2020. In my time there, I spent thousands of hours counselling children through a variety of issues. Supporting the welfare and wellbeing of children was extremely fulfilling. 

    Over time, I began to notice a change in the presentation of children coming through to speak to me. Increasing numbers of children were telling me that they were ‘trans’; that they felt trapped in the wrong body. These children were also becoming younger and younger. 

    You know…in a sense, children are born in the wrong body, not some or lots of them but all of them. They’re born tiny and weak, and it takes them many years to catch up to adults. They’re powerless compared to adults, and they also lack the brain power and experience and accumulated knowledge of adults. This makes them very vulnerable to stupid ideas pushed on them by the grownups in their lives. Religions have exploited this vulnerability since forever, and now trans ideologues are doing the same thing.

    Some of the foundational principles of counselling include exploration, neutrality and not going into the conversation with a pre-determined outcome. However, I noticed that gender ideology was becoming more prevalent within Childline. I believed this was in breach of the core therapeutic ethics of the charity. 

    It doesn’t seem all that therapeutic to tell children they’re in the wrong body.

    It became clear that Childline were collaborating more closely with Stonewall. The first time I became aware of this was when I attended a shift and noticed that there were Stonewall posters plastered throughout the counselling room. They read: ‘Some People Are Trans; Get Over It’.

    “Some People Can Fly; Get Over It.”

    “Some People Are Tigers; Get Over It.”

    “Some People Are Superior; Get Over It.”

    I soon discovered that Stonewall appeared to have significant influence over the Childline webpage on ‘Gender Identity’, a site frequented by large numbers of young people. This page reads more as propaganda than nuanced guidance with the welfare of children at heart.  

    Gender ideology is far more valuable and important than the welfare of anyone other than people who call themselves trans.

    The webpage reads as more of a road map towards ‘transitioning’ than neutral advice. For example, Childline suggest ‘changing how you look or dress’ and ‘changing your name’. They even recommend ‘using different pronouns’, such as ‘ze and zir’ or ‘zey and zem’. This is even though we know that ‘social transition’ may cause irreversible change to a young person’s brain. Worryingly, there is not a single mention of the fact that gender dysphoria is a mental health condition, which, for most children, will resolve itself over time. 

    In short it’s recruitment rather than counselling.

    Childline kicked Esses out, and has continued to embrace trans ideology and urge it on the children it’s supposed to be helping.

    There are also serious concerns over the lack of safeguarding in the counselling being offered to children. This can be seen through ‘Ask Sam’ ­– Childline’s publicly available messaging service, in which a child can send in a message and ‘Sam’ will respond with advice and guidance that can be read by all Childline users. 

    In 2019, a 14-year-old girl wrote to ‘Ask Sam’, stating ‘I’m struggling with my gender identity’ and ‘I hate my breasts’. Just four paragraphs into the response, ‘Sam’ suggests the use of breast binders, something we know can cause irreversible physical damage to a young girl’s body. This is deeply concerning. 

    In another letter, from 2021, a young girl states that she is ‘trans’ and suffering from ‘dysphoria’. She expresses worry about getting ‘pregnant’ in later life, even though she eventually wants ‘biological kids’. Within a few sentences of the response, ‘Sam’ suggests the option of ‘surgery and hormones’ for this confused, young girl. The response goes on to say that ‘because you’re male living in a female body, you don’t have the sperm to make a baby’. Most concerning of all is when ‘Sam’ suggests to the young girl: ‘have a surrogate mother carry the baby for you.’ 

    Yes, just go to the surrogate mother office and rent a surrogate mother. Easy, quick, guaranteed.

  • Absolutely nothing you can do to stop me

    Man boasts about his implacable campaign to force himself on women in a vulnerable situation:

    Saying there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop me is very rapey. Very very very rapey.

  • Explain yourself immediately

    Jolyon Maugham is on the naughty step?

    Why does Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project have to explain a tweet from someone called Right to Equality? The two are In Partnership.

    Teaming up with Jolyon Maugham of all people to campaign for women’s rights – nah, thanks, I’ll pass.

    So it’s nice to see them fighting.

    Taste of his own medicine for Jolyon eh?

    H/t latsot

  • Felis catus

    Seen on Facebook: cat mosaics purported to be from Pompeii. Snopes says no, they’re by a contemporary artist. Still nice cat mosaics though.

    No photo description available.

  • Influencer

    A new misogyny role model:

    When Abbie Marsh (not her real name) overheard a 15-year-old boy in the West Midlands school she works in praising Andrew Tate, the social influencer known as the “king of misogyny”, she asked him if he understood Tate’s views on women. The boy replied: “Well, men are better than women, so he’s right.” His friends all nodded in agreement.

    …

    Many parents may be hearing about Tate for the first time, but schools across the country say he is already a hugely familiar figure to many of their pupils. Many are giving teachers training on how to talk to students about him. Some are holding special assemblies, or using personal social and health education lessons to encourage students to question the content he puts out.

    Men who claim to be women on the one hand, fans of men like Andrew Tate on the other. Heads women lose, tails men win.

    Teachers say boys are often sucked into his “glamorous” ultra-macho world by more benign content on fast cars or fitness. But in his videos he also says women are a man’s property, cannot do jobs as well as men, and belong at home. He thinks rape victims should “bear responsibility” for their attacks and boasts about seeking out 18-year-old girls because they are “fresh”.

    Plus fast cars and fitness.

  • Who pays

    This is how it should work – the disadvantage is only to the gender-swapper, not to all the women in the gender-swapper’s chosen sport.

    Transgender male swimmer Iszac Henig has admitted that his transition has made him a statistically worse swimmer after he finished 79th out of 83 at men’s meet –  but says he ultimately ‘lives more’ as a man. 

    Fine. No problem. Nobody loses.

    Henig, 21, has begun swimming for the Yale men’s team after placing as an All-American on the women’s team the previous year.

    In an op-ed published Thursday, Henig notes that his times are ‘about the same’ as last season when he swam with women but that as a result, in a November meet, he finished 79th out of 83. 

    Yes, and that’s exactly why men should stop making this move: the people who pay for it are the women the men compete against.

    It’s a far fall in terms of competing, given that Henig was such a heralded women’s swimmer she competed in the 2016 Olympic trials and was named one of the top 100 female swimmers in the country. 

    But the fall is taken by Henig alone, and Henig considers it worth it; no harm no foul.

    The objection to men doing this to women isn’t arbitrary and it isn’t “transphobic”; it’s specific to men doing it to women, because it’s damaging and unfair.

  • Crime Report

    Would be considered.

    https://twitter.com/patrickbasedmn/status/1611543509668073472

    “Crime report”

    “the rainbow ‘pride’ flags which represent the LGBTQ community”

    “These comments are targeting specifically the LGBTQ community”

    “would be considered ‘grossly offensive’”

    “I therefore require you to contact me to arrange a voluntary interview”

    “If I do not hear from you”

    This is in the UK, where

    New scorecards show under 1% of reported rapes lead to conviction.

    Under 1% yet the police have the time and money to haul people in for questioning over a tweet about A RAINBOW PRIDE FLAG.

    And the combined idiocy and authoritarianism of the language is mind-numbing.

    “Crime report” – what crime??? I don’t know what the tweet in fact said, but I do know there’s been a lot of mockery and criticism of “rainbow flags” in crosswalks, some of which point out they interfere with the actual purpose of marked crosswalks, which is pedestrian safety. I really don’t think Mr Goddard swore a genocidal oath in his tweet, and I do wonder why the police have the time and resources to interview people over tweets rather than just telling Twitter to have a word with the naughty tweeter.

    Then there’s “”the rainbow ‘pride’ flags which represent the LGBT community.” No they don’t. They may refer to them, or serve as a symbol of resistance and/or solidarity, but it’s not really the job of the police to enforce such meanings. Also there is no such thing as “the LGBT community”; the LGB and the T have conflicting goals and interests. Also, even if there were such a thing, again it’s not the job of the police to police “communities” except in the most literal sense. Town and village police can be said to police communities, but the metaphorical kind are none of their business.

    Then “These comments are targeting specifically the LGBTQ community” – but are they? I haven’t seen them (or it – a single tweet was mentioned), but I can say there’s a difference between disputing and targeting. The putative LGBTQ community says a lot of stupid untrue things these days, especially about women who don’t grovel to men in dresses. People have a right to dispute the stupid untrue things that putative community says.

    Then “would be considered ‘grossly offensive’” – “would be” if what? By whom? For what reason? Why the conditional? Does the cop mean “I consider” the tweet grossly offensive? If so, why not say so? If not, why not let the people who do consider it offensive write to the “suspect”?

    Then of course there’s “I therefore require you to contact me to arrange a voluntary interview” – if you require it it ain’t voluntary.

  • To politicize

    News out of West Virginia:

    CHARLESTON – A federal judge has ruled a state law passed in 2021 keeps a transgender student-athlete who was born male from participating in girls’ sports.

    In his 23-page opinion issued January 5, U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin said he suspects the aim of House Bill 3293, which was known as the Save Women’s Sports Bill, was “to politicize participation in school athletics for transgender students.”

    Why is it “politicizing” to keep boys out of girls’ sports but not politicizing to let boys invade women’s sports? Who politicized first? Why is it political to protect girls’ sports but not political to destroy them?

    “Nevertheless, there is not a sufficient record of legislative animus,” Goodwin wrote. “I find that it is substantially related to an important government interest.”

    What kind of animus, flowing in what direction, from whom?

    Heather Jackson filed her complaint in federal court in May 2021 on behalf of Becky Pepper-Jackson against the West Virginia Board of Education, then-Superintendent Clayton Burch, the Harrison County Board of Education, county Superintendent Dora Stutler and the West Virginia Secondary Schools Activities Commission. Becky is 11 years old [and] identifies and lives as a girl.

    In other words Becky is a boy.

    In 2021, as she prepared to enter middle school, Becky expressed an interest in trying out for her school’s girls’ cross country and track teams. The school informed her mother the decision to let Becky participate depended on the outcome of HB 3293, which then was pending in the state Legislature. When the law passed, the school told Becky she could not try out for the girls’ team.

    Goodwin says the law “was clearly carefully crafted with litigation such as this in mind.”

    That’s because it’s not fair to girls and women to let male people compete against them.

    A spokesman for the West Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which was co-counsel on the case for the plaintiffs, said it is reviewing the ruling with co-counsel to determine the next steps.

    Of course it is. The ACLU is hell-bent on destroying women’s sports.

  • They appointed an expert group

    Scotland is contemplating a rather intrusive new law…

    The Scottish government is on a collision course with the courts again as it prepares legislation criminalising conversion therapy, according to a KC.

    It all depends on how you’re defining “conversion therapy.” Conversion from what to what, for a start, and then conversion by what means, and for what reasons, and so on.

    The SNP-Green alliance is considering plans to outlaw any activity – including parental chats, prayer and preaching – deemed to be an attempt to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity.

    Those are two radically different things. Sexuality, aka sexual orientation, isn’t spooky or magical or based on fantasy. It’s both pointless and cruel to try to talk people out of a sexual orientation, but on the other hand parents surely can talk about it without damaging their kids. At any rate, “gender identity” as we know much too well is not the same kind of thing at all. It rests on beliefs, and the beliefs happen to be very bonkers. Everyone should be free to talk about it.

    They appointed an expert group which made a series of recommendations for a new criminal offence, which it claims will be within Holyrood’s devolved powers.

    Ah, an expert group according to the SNP-Green alliance – we know what kind of “experts” those are likely to be.

    The opposition reported here comes from the Christian Institute, so it’s theocracy versus gender idenniny, which makes it hard to pick a side.

    Simon Calvert, a deputy director at the CI, said his organisation is preparing the ground for legal action similar to the named person challenge.

    …

    “Church workers, feminist activists, mums and dads – all sorts of innocent people could find themselves on the wrong end of a prosecution if this becomes law. And I think Scottish taxpayers will eventually find themselves picking up the legal bill for another court defeat.

    “LGBT people are rightly protected from physical and verbal abuse by existing law just like anyone else. But these proposals go much, much further. The Scottish government is considering a law that could criminalise churches and gender-critical feminists alike simply because their conversations around sex and gender don’t conform to a narrow, state-approved brand of LGBT politics.”

    Wings Over Scotland has more:

    The root of the story is a report produced for the Scottish Government by something called The Expert Advisory Group On Ending Conversion Practices (henceforth “the Group”). Its membership is a Who’s Who of the sort of people the Scottish Government likes to pay to agree with it.

    Most of the “experts” have an institution after their names but several hail from “lived experience.” It seems the Scottish government thinks “lived experience” of thinking of yourself as the other sex is a credential. Fantasy=credential. What could go wrong?

    So it’s already pretty evident that the Scottish Government has heavily stacked the makeup of the Group in order to produce the conclusions it wants. But what ARE those conclusions? On reading the Group’s report, it’s hard to avoid the view that if anything Aidan O’Neill KC has in fact played down its ramifications in his comments in Scottish Legal News.

    …

    In short, your children CAN consent to irreversible hormone treatments and surgeries rendering them permanently infertile and incapable of orgasm, and should be actively encouraged to do so, but they CANNOT consent to talking about their mental health in any way which might result in them changing their minds about that path, because to do so would render any person they talked to a criminal.

    In other words, it will be legal to help them transition to a different “gender”, but a crime to help them detransition, or even to persuade them not to do it in the first place.

    That sentence sounds self-evidently absurd and mad (although it does help to explain why we never got any answers to these questions), but it is the unequivocal recommendation of the report. Read the screenshots above. Read the entire document for yourself. It’s simply what it says.

    From John Knox to this. In a weird way it makes sense.

  • Austerity guru

    Speaking of Jack Monroe, Kathleen Stock is very funny on the subject:

    …austerity guru Jack Monroe has a new book, Thrifty Kitchen, to cheer us all up.

    Some of the suggested “home hacks” in this book have attracted particular mirth, seeming as they do to involve great effort and even high personal risk for exceptionally low reward. For instance, should you be desperate to get your hands on an egg ring — that is, a metal ring that helps you form perfectly round fried eggs — but unable to afford the £2.10 that would obtain you one from Amazon, Monroe suggests removing the lid and the bottom from a tuna tin, sanding the rough edges away, and washing afterwards to remove “any tiny dusty bits of metal”.

    But why would you be desperate to form perfectly round fried eggs? And in the unlikely event that you were thus desperate, why wouldn’t you just trim fried eggs into circles (of course eating the cut away scraps so as not to waste them)?

    Should you be poor enough to lack a tin opener, meanwhile — currently on sale in Tesco for 60p — she suggests using a “small sharp knife that you are not particularly attached to, a hammer or mallet, a bit of vigour, some patience and a VERY steady hand”.

    So…you lack a 60p tin opener but you do have a hammer or mallet and a small sharp knife you’re happy to ruin opening a tin. Pardon me while I think you don’t exist.

    Is Monroe really poor or does she just identify as poor?

    In the last year or so, an army of determined internet sleuths has arisen to challenge the official back story of poverty, obsessively documenting internal discrepancies within Monroe’s voluminous Twitter output, cross-referenced with her many heartfelt Guardian op-eds, interviews, and blog posts…

    Personally, although I find Monroe’s online persona more grating than — as she might have it — a metal sheet into which you’ve just punched several large holes with a sharp knife, I don’t think she’s a deliberate scammer. She strikes me as more of a disorganised, constitutionally inconsistent type who can’t remember what she last said from one moment to the next. Either way, I’m not too bothered. I’m just grateful for the lolz provided by some of the recipes — and specifically, the juxtaposition of Monroe’s middle-class culinary sensibilities with her cheap, ultra-processed ingredient list.

    Like “spaghetti hoops” for instance. Spaghetti whats now? Hoops, which aren’t spaghetti at all, they’re some weird brand-nightmare canned pasta in Horrible Sauce. Canned pasta is of its nature revoltingly overcooked and mushy; it can’t be repurposed into something edible.

    A much-derided blogpost of Monroe’s from last year suggests buying a tin of spaghetti hoops, washing the tomato sauce from the hoops, then grating some cheese on top to produce “Anellini Con Cacio e Pepe”. (Readers are also told that the washed-off tomato sauce can be reduced down “in a vigorous boil to concentrate it” to make something approximating tomato purĂ©e.) In the latest book, Monroe waxes lyrical about such culinary temptations as “moonshine mash” (Instant Mash mixed with pureed tinned sweetcorn), chicken cooked in Fanta, and cornflake ice-cream.

    That’s the point where I had to stop reading to laugh for a long time.

    Kathleen goes on to make a case that Monroe is presenting herself as a kind of Ma Ingalls from the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, “ingeniously building a succession of bright, glowing homes for herself and her child out of nothing, in the midst of a punishing economic wilderness.” It doesn’t work but it’s a comforting fantasy.

  • UN Stupid & Dishonest

    So much lying patronizing stupid bullshit in one little tweet.

    ALL rabbits have a right to be safe and live free from violence and discrimination – #trans rabbits [aka wolves] included!

    To itemize the lying patronizing stupid bullshit –

    One: it’s not a “reminder”; it’s a stand-alone announcement that relies on a dishonest label.

    Two: we know all too well what “ALL women” means: it means women including men who say they are women – in other words it means women and some deluded or fraudulent men.

    Three: trying to shove us into agreeing that men are women if they say they are is insulting as well as dangerous (to us, women) as well as an outrageous injustice.

    Four: men are the sex that is the source of most violence and discrimination toward women, so it’s not just ludicrous and insulting to try to push us into pretending some men are women, it’s also a complete negation of our centuries of effort to end that violence and discrimination.

    Five: hashtags don’t make lies true. Trans women are not women; that’s what “trans” means.

    Six: we do stand up for human rights, but it’s not a human right for men to force women to agree that men are women if they say they are.

    Seven: the image of the lantern-jawed guy in lipstick and earrings is just another insult.

  • Send gender-neutral help

    Welsh language: Non-binary speakers want gender-neutral help

    That’s one of the more cryptic headlines I’ve seen today. People who speak non-binary want help with what? What is gender-neutral help? What does Welsh language have to do with it?

    Non-binary Welsh speakers have said they feel unable to express their identities in the language due to its gendered nature.

    Oh, that.

    Here’s a helpful tip: nobody cares. Non-binary Welsh speakers don’t need to “express their identities,” because nobody cares. Nobody cares about other people’s identities. Don’t adults explain that to children any more? It’s the universal truth: nobody cares as much about you as you do. Nobody wants to hear about you as much as you want to talk about you.

    They want to see more awareness and use of inclusive LGBTQ+ language.

    There is no such language. The TQ+ is an invader. Most people are deeply tired of it.

    Many non-binary people use the plural “nhw” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun.

    …

    The lack of knowledge of LGBTQ+ terms in Welsh means when people use “nhw” sometimes they are unable to be understood, according to Rowan Gulliver, a 22-year-old teacher in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan.

    You don’t say. If you invent silly new bits of language then people aren’t going to understand what you’re saying. That’s how it flibblez.

    Working in a Welsh-speaking school, Rowan – who uses the non-binary Mx prefix and they/them pronouns – had to come out to colleagues in English because they did not feel they could be understood in Welsh, nor did they have the vocabulary to do so.

    They who? The colleagues? Rowan? You see the problem here?

    “You should be able to speak about your identity and other people in your first language,” they said. “It’s like a little part of you is dying when you have to say it in English.”

    Not if your “identity” is silly trendy nonsense.

  • They deeply sympathize

    Ah yes, the party of the workers.

    Republicans care deeply about those impoverished workers.

  • Deemed to be an attempt

    Discussion will be a crime.

    The Scottish government is on a collision course with the courts again as it prepares legislation criminalising conversion therapy, according to a KC.

    But what are they defining as conversion therapy? Oh, only almost everything.

    Double silk Aidan O’Neill KC has warned that the proposals would be outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament.

    The SNP-Green alliance is considering plans to outlaw any activity – including parental chats, prayer and preaching – deemed to be an attempt to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity.

    Just for a start, they shouldn’t put sexuality and “gender identity” in the same law. The two are not comparable. Sexual orientation has nothing at all to do with mutilating the body, while “gender identity” has way too much to do with it. Sexual orientation doesn’t intrude on anyone else’s rights; “gender identity” takes a blowtorch to women’s rights.

    The rest of the pieces focuses on religion and its rights, so I’ll stop there.