Best Of

Hope this is a sign @Cyclefree is feeling a bit better.

Absolutely, and it's a powerful piece. I feel like I sit at the crossroads on this issue. I have a wife and a daughter and have seen and heard too many examples of men who tret women and girls as chattel. Protecting women from the predatory nature of certain men is something I actively support.

I also have involvement in the trans area. I'm bisexual so I'm part of the LGBTetc community. My eldest (non-binary but biologically male) had a trans boyfriend for a while and they're still close friends. A former colleague and good friend is a trans woman saving up for surgery.

My basic rule with rights is that if they trample on the human rights of other people they aren't rights. I support both the need for female spaces (my wife despises open changing even when everyone has the same genitalia) and to provide dignity and respect for people who genuinely have dysmorphia and are medically working their way through transition.

The problem with the trans debate is the screaming extremists at both ends of the spectrum. Absolutism is usually wrong - issues are not black and white and this one is no different. I do have to float a question though - in the race to be inclusive have we not lost sight of who we are being inclusive of?

I can see a world of difference between people who are seriously and medically altering their bodies to become the gender they believe they really are, and a bloke wearing a frock and a wig. But the trans rights row seems to lump everyone together.

Renaud Camus, of “great replacement” fame, is banned from entering the UK.

https://x.com/renaudcamus/status/1912916580876398951

Oh oh, latest news : “Your presence in the UK is not considered to be conducive to the public good... ” — interdiction d’accès.

Queue people who demand the border is controlled and that others get turned away getting outraged that the border is controlled and someone is being turned away.

(LuckyGuy1983)
Cue.
(/LuckyGuy1983)

My dyslexic daughter considers the word 'queue' the most ridiculous word in the language. 80% of it is superfluous.

Not superfluous at all. 'Queue' distinguishes itself clearly from 'cue', 'Kew' and 'q'. So that you can be on cue for the queue to get into Kew Gardens while minding your ps and qs. The alternative is linguistic qaos. And greetings to your daughter.

https://x.com/alexharmstrong/status/1912878438412673447

Jaw-dropping footage revealed by @markwhiteTV today showing what GB News believes to be Sudanese migrants showing off their 4* hotels.

This is a mockery. There are homeless British citizens sleeping rough on the street and economic migrants fleeing France are a priority for our government.

Keir Starmer promised he would end the migrant hotels, yet another failure.

These videos are nothing but an advertisement for others to come to the UK, of which we believe, there are thousands more queueing up.

If we allowed asylum seekers to work, which that moron May stopped, we wouldn't need to host them in hotels, 4* or otherwise.

Truly one of the worst policy decisions of my lifetime.

.

Evening all.

The interesting thing about today's judgement is that it is being portrayed as the Supreme Court defining what a woman is, where as actually it is the Supreme Court defining what the Equality Act says a woman is. There's nothing to stop Parliament from amending the act, but will the parties support doing so?

Con and Ref - clear no
Lab - some of the activists will want it, but can't see Starmer touching with a bargepole
SNP - sounds like still yes
Green (Eng/Wal) and LD - ???

Labour will do whatever it thinks its phantom red wall voters want, just like it’s doing with Trump.

Amidst all the triumphalism I hope at least a handful of MPs from whichever party will find it in their hearts to remember that trans people are human beings too, and not join the ranks of those who would have 2+2 equal 5 and say transgender people are just deluded and mentally ill, or “pretending”.

Because that is the undercurrent. I seem to be in a minority of 1 here in having any qualms about this, probably because I’m a “Lib Dem twat”, but there you have it.

Not a minority of one.

No, there are a few of us.
But I don’t see much point on getting in an argument with the triumphalists - or those who appear happy to call my son mentally ill.

I think we need to be much more tolerant of difference and the modern tendency to give a diagnosis to any difference and to medicalise it is generally unhelpful. Trans people that I have come across have a clear and distinct sense of self. I think that we all do. The difference is that their sense of self is not consistent with their biological reality and this often makes them unhappy. They try to bring their physical reality into accord with that sense of self either by surgery or medication. That needs compassion, consideration and support but it doesn't make them mentally ill.

Nick Robinson blames listeners for Radio 4’s Today program losing over a million listeners in the last 12 months.

Blame the audience. A sure fire way of winning them back.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/26/nick-robinson-bbc-radio-4-today-programme-ratings-slump/

I am a lifelong listener to R4 Today. I remember Jack de Manio well, he finished in about 1971.

I sometimes turn it off. Too matey, too dull, too magazine programme like, too much trivia, too many boring single issue people, too bland. In the current USA crisis - in some ways the biggest story since WWII - its coverage is too timid, too little, insufficently analytical and compares spectacularly badly with USA internal coverage and to some extent Times Radio and LBC.

It has this massive 3 hour space, and the entire resource of BBC contacts worldwide to be both deep and properly global.

I still listen to it, but it needs to rethink, deepen, sharpen, avoid all luvviedom and use the BBC resource properly.

It’s the “Radio 5isation” of Today that’s really pissing me off. Hearing the presenters say “we want to hear from you, our WhatsApp number is xxxxxxx” really depresses me. And Emma Barnett really would be better off having a show where she just interviews herself so it’s either an hour of insane constant interruption or she actually stops to listen to the one person she wants to hear.

They’ve also managed to cock up the 5am to 5.45 slot by stopping the news from Workd service etc and replacing it with Today in parliament which is super tedious at theat time of day especially.

TBF to R4 Today, I have enjoyed the recent spate of five year olds with names like Allegro explaining how much they are enjoying rereading Middlemarch during the Easter holidays. I bet their mothers are scary.

Children called Allegro should be reading Austen.