Thursday, 24 July 2025
Two issues of liberty
Wednesday, 23 July 2025
Competing Ideologies
Labour has become embroiled in a fresh row over trans rights after activists put forward a biological man to be the women's officer for an LGBT+ group.
Given enough time, factions in left wing parties always end up fighting like rats in a sack!
The Trans Rights Alliance, a newly formed organisation seeking to change Labour's approach to gender issues, has put forward a number of candidates for election on July 19. One of them includes Steph Richards - a transgender woman in possession of a gender recognition certificate - who is standing for women's officer.
However, a gender critical group within the party, Labour LGB, said the move breaks party rules by 'putting a man forward to be a women's officer'.
Not just any man desperate to encroach on female spaces, but one with form in this regard:
However, Ms Richards has pushed back at claims she does not have a right to stand for the position.
Why can’t the press leave off with this now-towing to these lunatic’s demands? It’s ‘he’!
She told Labour List: 'I am legally female, other than in regards to the Equality Act and the Equality Act does not apply to the position within LGBT+ Labour so I am thoroughly within my legal right and my moral right to be able to stand.'The irony of a Labour politician claiming a moral right to do anything isn’t lost on us….
Ms Richards has previously claimed trans people can change their biological sex 'a little bit' and boasted about running a 'safe space' where men could dress up as women in secret, including as 'schoolgirls'.
Because it’s a fetish!
Last year, she faced fierce criticism after being appointed chief executive of Hampshire-based charity, Endometriosis South Coast, in a move women's rights campaigners branded 'worrying and insulting'.
And everyone else branded utterly nonsensical! But still the male encroachment rumbles on and on…
Tuesday, 22 July 2025
UK state of play, politically
Monday, 21 July 2025
It Isn’t Even Breaking The Middle East
Oh, give me a break!
Sereen Haddad is a bright young woman. At 20 years old, she just finished a four-year degree in psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in only three years, earning the highest honors along the way. Yet, despite her accomplishments, she still can’t graduate. Her diploma is being withheld by the university, “not because I didn’t complete the requirements”, she told me, “but because I stood up for Palestinian life”.
By making such a nuisance of yourself, and preventing the other students who just wanted to study without some screeching lunatic on campus disrupting their education, that eventually the police had to be called to remove you.
Haddad, who is Palestinian American, had been raising awareness on her campus about the Palestinian fight for freedom as part of her university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
Maybe ‘raising awareness’ isn’t quite the right phrase to describe what this organisation does?
Israel’s war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict.
I don’t think that anyone - well, apart from your mob - has changed their view about whether killing, raping and torturing or taking hostages is a legitimate warfare tactic though?
This collapse began with the liberal world’s lack of resolve to rein in Israel’s war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel.
And funnily enough, the villain here is - of course - capitalism:
“When students expose the violence of Israel’s occupation and genocide, institutions like VCU, which are deeply entangled with weapon manufacturers and corporate donors, become fearful,” Haddad said. “So they twist the rules, they rewrite the policies, and they try to silence us … But it’s all about power. Our demands for justice are a threat to their complicity.”
You're no threat to anything except your own futures, with the criminal records you're amassing.
In 2003, the historian Tony Judt wrote that the “problem with Israel [is] … that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ – a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded – is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.” Judt’s idea that Israel is a relic of another era requires understanding how the global push for decolonization significantly accelerated after 1945. The result was a new world – but one that forsook the Palestinians, leaving them abandoned in refugee camps in 1948.
Why do these articles always gloss over what happened in Arab countries that accepted Palestinian refugees, like Jordan?
Sunday, 20 July 2025
Saturday, 19 July 2025
Opening a cafe
Thursday, 17 July 2025
If It’s Not Illegal, What Basis Can There Be For Fines?
Social media business models endangered the public by incentivising the spread of dangerous misinformation after the 2024 Southport murders, MPs have concluded, adding that current online safety laws have “major holes”.“It’s clear that the Online Safety Act [OSA] just isn’t up to scratch,” said Chi Onwurah, the committee chair, after a seven-month inquiry. “The government needs to go further to tackle the pervasive spread of misinformation that causes harm but doesn’t cross the line into illegality. Social media companies are not just neutral platforms but actively curate what you see online, and they must be held accountable.”
Accountability is a good thing, but MPs seem to only regard it as such in other people.
The committee called for fines of at least £18m if platforms do not set out how they will tackle significant harms that derive from content promoted by their recommendation systems even if it is not illegal.
I sincerely hope the big social media platforms treat this ridiculous overreach by these arrogant little pipsqueaks with the contempt it deserves.
Further fallout from Afghani-gate
Wednesday, 16 July 2025
Free Advertising!
The Met Office should name storms after fossil fuel companies, campaigners have said, after the weather forecasting service opened a storm naming competition.Climate campaigners have recommended the Met Office names its storms after various oil and gas corporations to remind the public of the link between burning fossil fuels and extreme weather.
Oil and gas companies promptly say "There's no such thing as bad publicity!"
Hundreds of people have submitted ideas to the Met Office. While some have named specific oil and gas companies, others have suggested names such as “bigoil” and “fossily mcfuelface”.
Ah, that's the UK populace I've grown to know and admire...!
The release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has made the storms we experience more extreme, research from the forecaster has found. An attribution study cited by the Met Office found that rainfall in the winter season of 2023-24 was 20% more intense due to human-caused climate change, and the amount of rainfall observed during the season was 10 times more likely.
Of course they did...
Scientists predict that while the number of storms may not increase during climate breakdown, their intensity most likely will. This is because rising global temperatures contribute to more frequent weather anomalies such as the “Spanish plume”, which is when hot air from the Iberian peninsula moves northwards into the UK, creating unstable conditions that can lead to intense summer thunderstorms with heavy downpours and lightning.
I wish! I could do with a really good thunderstorm, haven't really had one in ages. Another of the scientist's promises that never come true...