Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • One in a billion

    What, they tripped and fell on the wrong clip? The dog ate their homework? They had the right clip all ready to go so someone must have stolen it while they were brushing their teeth?

    Fox News apologizes for showing old video of a hatless Donald Trump at a dignified transfer ceremony

    We’re sorry, we were just really coked up that day.

    Fox News apologized for airing old video of a hatless President Donald Trump during coverage Sunday of his attendance at the dignified transfer ceremony for U.S. soldiers killed in the Middle East war, insisting it was an honest mistake.

    And yet it was an honest mistake that made Trump look less like a greedy monster selling merch at a ceremony for US soldiers he got killed. What an odd coincidence.

  • Prettierna goldy baseball cap

    Pliny is wicked.

  • The great majority of people getting pregnant

    Rebecca Solnit ffs.

    Aren’t we just silly to get all riled up about the new encyclopedia of insults to women based on trans ideology? We should smile sweetly and nod in agreement and then go bake some pies.

  • Always hovering

    This is just extraordinary.

    I recommend watching it. It’s nauseating – Tom Harlow whispering into her ear for what seems like half an hour, like some kind of transphilic Svengali.

    View from the other side:

    Under His Eye indeed.

  • A touch of glam

    If there’s a way to get it wrong, he will find that way. If there’s a way to get it horribly wrong he’ll find that too.

    Trump made a bold accessory choice while attending the dignified transfer of six U.S. service members killed in his war with Iran.

    Trump, 79, stood as six coffins covered in American flags were solemnly carried from an aircraft to a waiting vehicle at Delaware’s Dover Air Force Base on Saturday afternoon. On Trump’s head sat a gold-embroidered white hat with the letters “USA” on the front, “45-47″ on one side, and the American flag on the other.

    The $55 cap is available to purchase on the president’s merch website.

    Well so he saw an opportunity to do a little quiet marketing and he took it. What’s the big deal?

    Based on publicly available images, the president’s baseball cap, which he has never worn during a dignified transfer, drew immediate outrage. No other U.S. president has worn a baseball hat during a dignified transfer, based on publicly available images.

    California governor and top Trump critic Gavin Newsom wrote above a video shared by the White House, “Take your hat off, you disgusting little man.”

    Well it’s not a hat, it’s a baseball cap. It’s a very affordable baseball cap at a mere 55 dollars.

    “This fool has ABSOLUTELY no sense of dignity or appreciation for the moment,” wrote former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele on X. “It is called the Dignified Transfer for a reason. Take your damn hat off!!” Political strategist Chris D. Jackson wrote, “Trump just wore a campaign hat to a dignified transfer for fallen U.S. soldiers that were killed during his Iranian blunder.”

    Guys guys guys it’s called marketing. There is no higher calling than peddling overpriced baseball hats that double as advertising for a loathsome crook.

  • TBAS meets TGD

    A new syndrome is born.

    Trans broken arm syndrome: A mixed-methods exploration of gender-related medical misattribution and invasive questioning

    Gender-related medical misattribution and invasive questioning (GRMMIQ), colloquially known as “trans broken arm syndrome,” is a form of medical discrimination faced by transgender and gender diverse (TGD) patients wherein a provider incorrectly assumes that a medical condition results from a patient’s gender identity or medical transition. This phenomenon may take one of two forms: (1) the incorrect and explicit misattribution of gender identity or medical transition as being the cause of an acute complaint, or (2) invasive and unnecessary questions regarding a patient’s gender identity or gender transition status.

    What I wonder is how these researchers know that the provider is incorrect in “assuming” – or suspecting, wondering, etc – that the medical condition could be the cause or a cause of an acute complaint.

    Nearly one-third of participants reported experiencing GRMMIQ. Experiences were associated with outness to acute care providers and other types of gender-related discrimination in healthcare settings. Analysis of qualitative data revealed four primary themes: (1) assumptions of disordered thinking and being, (2) hyperfocus on aspects of medical transition, (3) cultural ignorance and incompetence, and (4) dismissiveness of the patient.

    But do we know for absolutely certain that there is no disordered thinking involved? Have we absolutely nailed it down that “trans” is never a mistake or an illusion or a socially shaped way of viewing the self? I’ll be honest: I don’t think we have.

  • Guest post: Like a gift to peasants

    Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Matching the instruments.

    “Make Iran Great Again.”

    Greatness is something that only Trump can bestow, like a gift to peasants too stupid to do things for themselves. With His Royal Touch (and the dropping of a few tons of high explosives), all will be made Good and Right, and the Iranian people will thank him and demand that he be given the Nobel Peace Prize once he finishes bombing them into gratitude.

    Except in Trump’s view, no other country can be (or is ever allowed to be) as “Great” as the United States. This is the whole point behind his attempts at zero-sum trade deals; the United States (read Trump) has to win. A deal in which both sides come out ahead means that America (Trump) has “lost”, that something was left on the table, or given away to the other guy, and that America was somehow “ripped off” and “taken advantage of.” Nobody else is allowed to get ahead, or break even. Mutual advantage precludes American (Trump’s) domination and superiority over everyone else. All other nations are supposed to bow down and worship America (Trump), and give the US (Trump) what it (he) wants. If they won’t do it willingly, he will make them.

    He’s made it personal, too. Everything is actually about him. What’s good for Trump is good for America, and good for the whole fucking world. The brilliance of his achievements self-enrichment and grandiosity is somehow supposed to uplift and awe his own grateful, compliant, peasantry, like a video image of the dim, comfortless glow of a cheap, fake fireplace, viewed through a cracked, dirty window. Always The Most, The Best, Like Nobody Has Ever Seen before, and something only he could ever have done. It’s all part of the Trump Brand. If he could, he’d name the whole goddamn country after himself, and cover the whole thing in trashy gold gewgaws.

  • Thinly veiled misogyny

    The Green Party v Reality:

    The Green Party was once, however briefly, a genuine refuge for people who believed that politics ought to be grounded in material reality: in the physical world, in measurable consequences, in science. It believed in ecosystems and feedback loops; in the hard logic of cause and effect. It understood that you cannot simply wish away inconvenient truths, whether those truths concern carbon emissions or the biological distinction between male and female human beings. That, at least, is what many of its founding members believed they had joined.

    What they discovered instead is something altogether more alarming: a party leadership so in thrall to a well-funded ideological orthodoxy that it is prepared to break its own rules, exhaust its own finances, and silence its own women rather than acknowledge what a unanimous Supreme Court has since confirmed in law. On 16 April 2025, in a ruling that shook every HR department, equality body, and political party in Britain, the Supreme Court declared that the words ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. The party’s response was to dismiss the judgment as ‘thinly veiled transphobia.’ You could not, if you tried, design a more perfect illustration of a movement that has ceased to engage with reality.

    Now, the Green Women’s Declaration (GWD), a group of Green Party members who hold what the law explicitly recognises as protected beliefs, has formally commenced legal proceedings against the party for discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. For more than two years they raised formal complaints and asked reasonable questions about the treatment of women who hold gender-critical views. For more than two years they were met with silence, hostility, or expulsion. This is not an internal spat. It is a reckoning.

    Women are not a fantasy or a feeling or a self-image. Women are real just as men are real, just as water and soil and carbon dioxide are real.

  • Narcissist shares his story on Women’s Day

    Yes kids it’s International Women’s Day soooooooooo it’s time to talk about men!

    He does. He actually does.

    For International Women’s Day 2026, the Gazette has been speaking to women across the city. Here is Councillor Amy Kirkby Taylor’s contribution, in her own words.

    I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to focus on here, my first thought was to focus on the barriers that women face in life, and how it feels to have them appearing in my life as I begin my transition. But this year’s Women’s Day theme is Give to Gain, and I want to return the love given by the women around me.

    Because in total opposition to the narrative we are fed about trans people living within their adopted gender, that has been my experience. The vast majority of women have been happy to welcome me into the sisterhood with even my political rivals saying they were pleased to see another woman in the chamber.

    If that’s true they’re either brainwashed or terrorized. Adding a man is not seeing another woman in the chamber. Adding a man is seeing another man in the chamber. Hope that clarifies.

  • Move over, sluts

    Trans “activists” invade a women’s march on Women’s Day. Of course they do.

  • Alarmed and distressed by questions

    I saw this

    So I decided to seek information on this centre. On its home page you get enormous corporate Memphis balloon women and two headlines.

    Run by women for all women.

    We provide a supportive space to help all self-identifying women achieve their goals.

    Got that? All women, by which they mean including the ones who are men. All self-identifying women, by which they mean including the ones who are men.

    On their About us page they boast some more about how expansive their welcome is.

    We exist to help all self-identifying women in Nottinghamshire reach their full potential, have their voices heard, and overcome barriers to create a better future for themselves and their children.

    They even have a drop-in space. You can drop in!

    We’re also a free, safe community space in Nottingham City Centre where any self-identifying woman can drop in for a cup of tea in our Welcome Space or relax and browse our Women’s Library. There’s no need to book unless you’re coming along for a specific service or activity, so pop in any time during our opening hours to have a look around.

    Just pop in dahling! They’re here for you!

  • Matching the instruments

    Tom Nichols explains that having a highly competent military in the hands of a highly incompetent idiot is not a good thing.

    Strategy is about matching the instruments of national power—and especially military force—to the goals of national policy. The president and his team, however, have not enunciated an overarching goal for this war—or, more accurately, they have presented multiple goals and chosen among them almost randomly, depending on the day or the hour. This means that highly effective military operations are taking place in a strategic vacuum.

    Worse, Donald Trump is now pointing to these missions as if the excellence with which they have been conducted somehow constitutes a strategy in itself. He appears so enthralled by the execution of these missions that he has enlarged the goals of this war to include the complete destruction of the Iranian regime, after which he will “Make Iran Great Again.”

    In other words he’s like a little kid playing with a fancy new toy bomber plane with real smoke and bangs.

    This kind of thinking is an old problem, and it has a name: “victory disease,” meaning that victory in battle encourages leaders to seek out more battles, and then to believe that winning those battles means that they are winning the larger war or achieving some grand strategic aim—right up until the moment they realize that they have overreached and find themselves facing a military disaster or even total defeat.

    And if there’s anyone on the planet likely to fall victim to victory disease it’s Donald Trump.

    American military operations have for the most part been astonishingly well executed. Years of training, study, and planning, along with careful use of intelligence, have all contributed to the rapid elimination of much of Iran’s capacity to project power, and almost all of its ability to resist allied attacks.

    Operational competence, however, cannot answer the question of national purpose. What is the war about, and when will America know it’s done? Trump, when pressed, dodges the issue of war aims by pointing to the excellence of the military. “I hope you are impressed,” Trump said on Thursday to ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better.” Trump then repeated, “How do you like the performance?” Karl noted that no one is questioning the success of military operations, and he asked the president what happens next. “Forget about ‘next,’” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”

    Yuh huh. That’s our boy. “Fagett about next. Just admire the bangs.”

    Meanwhile, despite the successes of the military overseas, Trump now admits that a regime that was supposed to be eliminated quickly could reach the United States with terrorist attacks. He told Time this week that “we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.” 

    Yes but we didn’t go to war, you did.

  • In wrong place

    Are they just impossibly stupid?

    Starmer ‘in wrong place’ on trans rights, says Thornberry

    Sir Keir Starmer has “ended up in the wrong place” on trans issues, Dame Emily Thornberry has said.

    The senior Labour MP, who was Sir Keir’s shadow attorney general before the general election, claimed the party had not been “following our hearts” when it came to trans people.

    So trans people=following hearts and women=not following hearts? Why would that be? Are women as a group strikingly unlovable? Or what? Please explain.

    The Prime Minister’s public position on trans issues has significantly changed since he became leader of the Labour Party in 2020, backtracking last year on his previous stance that “trans women are women”.

    Blah blah blah position blah blah backtracking blah blah stance – if you just think about it instead of racing around trying to find a stance, you will realize how fatuous it is. Whether or not men are women is not a stance, it’s a fact, and the answer is no.

    [Dame Emily] told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “I think we’ve ended up in the wrong place on trans and I think we’ve ended up treading very self-consciously and not ending up following our hearts.”

    She added: “Trans people are on the margins, they are vulnerable. If the Labour Party doesn’t look after trans people, what are we about?”

    I don’t know, what are you about? Are you not aware that women are vulnerable? Are you not aware that women are even on the margins, when it comes to power and being heard and not being shoved out the window the minute a man in drag shows up? Why are you sobbing and whining about trans people at the expense of women? As Basil Fawlty put it: Is this a piece of your brain?

  • were fizzikkly SIKK

    Via Humans of Dewsbury:

    A primary school teacher from Batley has caused uproar today after they refused to teach two 9 year olds who had dressed up as Harry Potter characters for World Book Day!

    Ze Berry who does not use conventional pronouns and uses ‘Ze’ instead, says were [sic] physically SICK after seeing the two pupils walk into the classroom who were dressed as Harry Potter and Dobbie The Elf.

    Despite parents of the children saying it was an insane overreaction, Ze Berry stood by her decision and said;

    “JK Rowling is a transphobic bigot and any character she has created therefore has transphobic undertones which are not tolerated in the classroom.”

    Ze Berry is a reasonablepeoplephobic bigot who should not be teaching anyone of any age any subject.

    The Mayor Of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin has lept to the teacher’s defence and stated; “Teachers should feel safe in the classroom. Ze Berry’s actions were justified.”

    Well of course teachers should feel safe in the classroom; what’s that got to do with a kid dressing as Harry Potter? Even if you think JKR is wrong about everything, how do you get from there to freaking out over a Harry Potter costume?

    We’ll never know.

  • Well, Johnny

    He rates it? As one would rate a movie or a coffee shop? We’re grading these things now? Will there be tourism guides that rate the local wars for the convenience of tourists?

  • You’ve been thinking

    Oh dear god.

    Click play.

  • Just days

    Huh. What a surprise. It turns out not to be easy to slap a country and make it do what you want.

    Trump insists he’s willing to wage war on Iran “forever.”

    But just days into the fight, many of those around him are already itching to get out.

    Just days, eh? So what were they thinking just days ago? That Iran would go belly-up like a giggling puppy? That it would be a very fun day out and then all would go back to normal?

    “It’s a political risk, no ands, ifs or buts,” one Trump adviser said of an attack that the president has forecast could continue for weeks. “Let’s just hope something doesn’t go really wrong. Because if that happens, it’s going to be a problem.”

    Jesus christ. What do they think going really wrong looks like? What did they think this was going to look like?

    Those troubling dynamics are only likely to worsen as the death toll rises and the risk of a wider regional war remains front and center, allies and advisers have warned, further jeopardizing Trump and Republicans’ already-grim chances of avoiding a wipeout in November’s midterms.

    Also – by the way – just a tiny little additional fly in the ointment here – people are being killed. The fact that “the death toll rises” isn’t just a troubling dynamic for Trump’s whatever, it’s people being killed.

    “What’s going to matter to normal people is where we are three to four months from now,” a Trump adviser said. “And as always, it’s the same: Is the price of electricity going down, are the price of groceries going down?”

    For sure. Normal people don’t care about people being killed, they care about the price of groceries.

  • “Potential” doing a lot of work there

    There’s no other source for this, so treat it with caution. But if it’s real…hooboy.

    If it’s real…I’m guessing the idea is that conservatives are more likely to defend and/or read Shakespeare and Chaucer and so on, but even so. Come on.

    And Beowulf? It’s my bet that no one is likely to read Beowulf.

  • Grab nearest bucket

    Ewwwwwwwww

    There isn’t enough bleach in the world.

  • Buhbye

    Noem out.

    Trump on Thursday announced he was replacing Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary, after the killing of two US citizens by immigration agents and mounting reports of her questionable personal conduct attracted bipartisan criticism.

    After or because of?

    A Republican former congresswoman and governor of South Dakota, Noem was considered a potential running mate for Trump as he sought re-election in 2024, but ultimately passed over after she admitted in a memoir to killing a dog she owned. The president instead nominated her to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the border patrol and other agencies that took to the streets of major US cities during Trump’s second term to carry out his mass deportation agenda.

    Noem became a public face of the crackdown, which ensnared immigrants with documentation and without as well as US citizens, appearing regularly on conservative television networks as well as in promotional material on DHS social media accounts.

    After federal agents deployed to Minneapolis killed Renee Good and then, weeks later, Alex Pretti, Noem accused both US citizens of being involved in “domestic terrorism”. But the allegation appeared to fly in the face of what was known about both’s participation in anti-ICE protests, and Democrats along with some Republicans called for Noem to resign after Pretti’s death.

    But it was the blanket that really did her in.

    Simultaneously, reports began to emerge of Noem and Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who was her senior adviser, engaging in a personal relationship, despite both being married, amid turmoil at the department.

    In February, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy report into her leadership of the DHS that found Noem and Lewandowski had done little to obfuscate their personal relationship, while berating staff and administering polygraph tests to those they did not trust.

    The pair had been traveling on a luxury 737 Max jet equipped with a private cabin, which the department has been seeking to acquire for around $70m for “high-profile deportations”. In one instance, Lewandowski fired a US Coast Guard pilot who left a blanket belonging to Noem on a plane, but then reinstated him because there was no one else to fly them back.

    Oh well, back to South Dakota. It won’t be quite the same after all that, but hey, at least it’s not North Dakota.