I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
Manchester. The man turned up to a pro-trans event in anti-trans tee shirt. He was jeered and had his hat nicked. Not great but hardly as presented. And both sides are guilty of abusing stats. Eg the "48% of transwomen in prison are in for sex crimes" as featured on here the other day, this one should carry an enormous health warning, as is obvious when you dig into it, yet it's been used to float all sorts of prejudiced garbage. And as for homophobia you should just see some of the stuff posted by some of the more extreme anti-trans obsessives (mainly blokes of a highly unreconstructed nature). There is simply no question that these are the sort of people who would have been battling against gay (or any minority apart from bigots) rights every step of the way. They probably still would be if they hadn't latched onto this. You make some great points, cyclefree, and put them well, and we're aren't as much at odds on this issue as it might appear, when it comes to what to do in practice, but boy are you a long way from being balanced. Which is fair enough, why argue the opposite case to the one you wish to push?, but I point this out in case people on here think otherwise. They should DTOR.
He turned up to Manchester Pride in an LGB Alliance cap and shirt. LGB Alliance are not anti trans, they are pro same sex.
Indeed they are being targeted by pro trans fanatics attacking their charitable status through the courts for no better reason than to silence them.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
We always coped with seasonal labour shortages in the summer with 'make do and mend.' Most of the gangs I worked with in the sixties (in Boston or Vilnius central as it later became) were composed of teenagers like me (in the evenings and school holidays), and women with children who could fit their hours around domestic duties.
Very few men worked on the land as there were always jobs that paid better and were a lot easier in the town The automated tate harvesters hadn't arrived then. Often you sat in the van and didn't get paid when it rained. Fortunately, it's relatively dry on the fens.
I now live in the NW and notice the difference.
I'm not surprised the farmers took advantage of the new labour force in the 2000s. It was becoming harder to persuade the locals to do the jobs.
Labour's view had then become that cheap labour was a good thing because it kept the food prices low. What a change from the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Did they die in vain? Forsaken for their new best mates - metropolitan luvvies.
OK, I exaggerate a touch, but the four Yorkshiremen sketch was funny.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
Manchester. The man turned up to a pro-trans event in anti-trans tee shirt. He was jeered and had his hat nicked. Not great but hardly as presented. And both sides are guilty of abusing stats. Eg the "48% of transwomen in prison are in for sex crimes" as featured on here the other day, this one should carry an enormous health warning, as is obvious when you dig into it, yet it's been used to float all sorts of prejudiced garbage. And as for homophobia you should just see some of the stuff posted by some of the more extreme anti-trans obsessives (mainly blokes of a highly unreconstructed nature). There is simply no question that these are the sort of people who would have been battling against gay (or any minority apart from bigots) rights every step of the way. They probably still would be if they hadn't latched onto this. You make some great points, cyclefree, and put them well, and we're aren't as much at odds on this issue as it might appear, when it comes to what to do in practice, but boy are you a long way from being balanced. Which is fair enough, why argue the opposite case to the one you wish to push?, but I point this out in case people on here think otherwise. They should DTOR.
He turned up to Manchester Pride in an LGB Alliance cap and shirt. LGB Alliance are not anti trans, they are pro same sex.
Indeed they are being targeted by pro trans fanatics attacking their charitable status through the courts for no better reason than to silence them.
You want bigotry. Read this.
Www.terfisaslur.com
That site is horrendous.
Shocking.
Little short of a terrorist group. Anti-science and rationality - spouting delusion:
"Acknowledging the existence of female biology is transphobic or cissexist"
A large fire at a key electricity converter station in the U.K. has shut down a major cable that brings power from France, worsening Britain’s energy crunch. Gas and power prices jumped.
The outage, which the U.K.’s grid manager said will last until at least Oct. 13, couldn’t come at a worse time with supplies already short and prices at record highs. Britain is a net importer of power, with France its biggest supplier via two cables that run across the English Channel.
I don't see anything suspicious about this at all. Haiti's Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been banned from leaving the country amid an investigation into his alleged involvement in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
A prosecutor is seeking charges against Mr Henry, who has been asked to explain his links with a key suspect in the killing, Joseph Felix Badio.
Records show the two men had multiple phone calls just hours after the assassination, prosecutors say...
On Monday, Mr Henry sent a letter purportedly sacking Chief Prosecutor Bed-Ford Claude and accusing him of a "serious administrative offence". He later nominated a replacement.
However, on Tuesday Mr Claude appeared to remain in his post as he asked a judge investigating the murder of Mr Moïse to charge the prime minister over his "suspected" involvement in the case.
Sources with knowledge of Haiti say it is not in the prime minister's remit to dismiss the prosecutor.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Or else what?
Well, they have a lovely large tourist industry - relative to their size - which sells the Faroes as this amazing, unspoiled, Edenic destination. Shame if something ever happened to that industry, like a worldwide boycott ensuring its collapse
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
First time I've heard about this. Campaigning isn't what it used to be - from my childhood I can remember no end of Greenpeace adds about seal clubbing.
No confirmation on a reshuffle. But fair to say no work in SW1 is getting done until it is (or it’s ruled out). Meetings / events being cancelled, decision making grinding to a halt & lots of ministers focused on whether their career is about to go up, stay the same or end
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
You are extremely arrogant, and typical of the neocon mindset.
Your views are right and must be imposed by fair means or foul.
Sod other cultures traditions if they offend white middle class arrogant western sensibilities.
India (and perhaps elsewhere?) recognises dolphins as “non human persons”. I think it would be rad if in the 21st Century likeminded nations formed a mutual defence treaty with a “responsibility to protect” type clause on the environment.
Get Dura out of retirement to strafe those jet skis. Blow deep sea dredgers out the water. Send in special forces to take out poachers. Etc…
Council tax going up, NI going up, income tax thresholds being frozen, jump in fuel prices, large jump in energy prices, all round price inflation, squeeze on public spending post-Covid... possibly an interest rate rise to dampen it down.
Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
Manchester. The man turned up to a pro-trans event in anti-trans tee shirt. He was jeered and had his hat nicked. Not great but hardly as presented. And both sides are guilty of abusing stats. Eg the "48% of transwomen in prison are in for sex crimes" as featured on here the other day, this one should carry an enormous health warning, as is obvious when you dig into it, yet it's been used to float all sorts of prejudiced garbage. And as for homophobia you should just see some of the stuff posted by some of the more extreme anti-trans obsessives (mainly blokes of a highly unreconstructed nature). There is simply no question that these are the sort of people who would have been battling against gay (or any minority apart from bigots) rights every step of the way. They probably still would be if they hadn't latched onto this. You make some great points, cyclefree, and put them well, and we're aren't as much at odds on this issue as it might appear, when it comes to what to do in practice, but boy are you a long way from being balanced. Which is fair enough, why argue the opposite case to the one you wish to push?, but I point this out in case people on here think otherwise. They should DTOR.
He turned up to Manchester Pride in an LGB Alliance cap and shirt. LGB Alliance are not anti trans, they are pro same sex.
Indeed they are being targeted by pro trans fanatics attacking their charitable status through the courts for no better reason than to silence them.
You want bigotry. Read this.
Www.terfisaslur.com
That site is horrendous.
Agreed; really, really nasty. The far right, and the infantile left have nothing on them. If ever there was a case for internet censorship ......
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
You are extremely arrogant, and typical of the neocon mindset.
Your views are right and must be imposed by fair means or foul.
Sod other cultures traditions if they offend white middle class arrogant western sensibilities.
Engaging is the best way.
Tell you what, ignore me. I don’t mind. But look at the photos I linked, and decide how you feel
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
Tories into 39 with another pollster. Down down down
Labours Lexit glass ceiling. Stuck stuck stuck.
Labour down on that as well. They are just going nowhere
Why should they go anywhere? They lost squillions of long serving votes to the Tories and are doing ZILCH, NIHIL, ABSOLUTELY NOWT to convince them to come back. If the government is rubbish (the last couple weeks they have been brilliant at protecting their 2019 voters) the worst that will happen is the voters Torys will keep again at the next election will merely go shy as don’t knows for mid term.
The disastrous position Labour find themselves in they need to be very very active at showing a government in waiting.
This is what the lost voters need to see for starters:
1. The leadership needs to show it has killer instinct the public are looking for, Starmer needs to put some underperforming heads on spikes ASAP - starting with Angela Rayner, Ashworth, Griffith, Smith.
2. Starmer needs to put poster boy of Remain and 2nd ref behind him, Starmer needs to communicate to the Lexits how he is going to build on the success of Brexit to level up their community and bring the good old days back. If he doesn’t do that he doesn’t get the vote back in the places he needs it.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
First time I've heard about this. Campaigning isn't what it used to be - from my childhood I can remember no end of Greenpeace adds about seal clubbing.
To be fair, many Faroese were disgusted at what happened. Just maybe it'll be the last time.
Council tax going up, NI going up, income tax thresholds being frozen, jump in fuel prices, large jump in energy prices, all round price inflation, squeeze on public spending post-Covid... possibly an interest rate rise to dampen it down.
Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly.
Not sure. Talked to a few strong Tories over the weekend, post the tax rise news. The responses can be summarised as: "The pandemic has cost a fortune - of course taxes were going to rise. What did people expect".
This will get lost in the reshuffle but anyway. Nice little segment with Bill Nelson, Biden’s Nasa administrator, on UFOs. He is of course unusually qualified for the role for a politician, having flown on the Columbia shuttle.
In short: yup UFO’s are real and tangible, rather than recording artefacts. We don’t know what they are, but I sure hope they’re not foreign adversaries given the technology they exhibit. We need to find out what they are and if friend or foe. Of course aliens are out there you dumbo. We have no plan on what do if Contact is initiated by them. Hopefully Spielberg got it right with ET who was “a friendly little fella”.
He also helpfully signposts how Disclosure will likely unfold. First, an exoplanet with signs of organic processes. I guess that will come not long after the James Webb telescope is operational (launches in Oct). Then microbes or fossilised microbes on Mars or Venus. Couple of missions targeting that. Then maybe something on Breakthrough Listen. And finally they’ll say, “you know those things that we told you for several years were here but for weird reasons most of you didn’t want to listen? Well you’d better be listening by now because we know what they are”.
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
First time I've heard about this. Campaigning isn't what it used to be - from my childhood I can remember no end of Greenpeace adds about seal clubbing.
It’s taking off on Twitter. To be fair this butchery only happened a couple of days ago. And the ‘hunt’ happens every year
The reason this one sticks out is the overwhelming scale of the slaughter - because the Faroese are now so rich they can all afford jet-skis, and join in, and hunt down thousands. In a day. Apparently it makes them feel ‘manly’
It is thought to be the biggest single slaughter of whales/dolphins in recorded history. And it happened this week.
Mr/Ms (I'm sorry, I'm terribly at remembering certain people) Moonshine, it's fascinating to consider whether aliens are likely to be friendly or aggressive.
Also irrelevant, as they're likely to be orders of magnitude more powerful than we are.
Lesbian dating agencies have plenty of ‘trans women’ on them. Which is fine if they want that but it is the guilt shaming and torrent of abuse they get for wishing to enjoy a single sex attraction and abuse as ‘vagina fetishists’
Oddly gay men don’t seem to get the same level of abuse about dating trans men.
Tories into 39 with another pollster. Down down down
Labours Lexit glass ceiling. Stuck stuck stuck.
Labour down on that as well. They are just going nowhere
Why should they go anywhere? They lost squillions of long serving votes to the Tories and are doing ZILCH, NIHIL, ABSOLUTELY NOWT to convince them to come back. If the government is rubbish (the last couple weeks they have been brilliant at protecting their 2019 voters) the worst that will happen is the voters Torys will keep again at the next election will merely go shy as don’t knows for mid term.
The disastrous position Labour find themselves in they need to be very very active at showing a government in waiting.
This is what the lost voters need to see for starters:
1. The leadership needs to show it has killer instinct the public are looking for, Starmer needs to put some underperforming heads on spikes ASAP - starting with Angela Rayner, Ashworth, Griffith, Smith.
2. Starmer needs to put poster boy of Remain and 2nd ref behind him, Starmer needs to communicate to the Lexits how he is going to build on the success of Brexit to level up their community and bring the good old days back. If he doesn’t do that he doesn’t get the vote back in the places he needs it.
The long-serving voters lost to the Tories are going to be difficult to get back because they are ideologically conservative in many ways and always have been. The spell is broken.
Labour's hope is that he LDs can draw sufficient voters from the CP to deny the latter a majority.
UK natural gas wholesale prices are ***jumping ~20% today*** to fresh record high as trades brace for more UK gas-fired power station demand after the loss of a key electricity interconnector between UK and France
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Or else what?
Well, they have a lovely large tourist industry - relative to their size - which sells the Faroes as this amazing, unspoiled, Edenic destination. Shame if something ever happened to that industry, like a worldwide boycott ensuring its collapse
You seem to be saying that I shouldn't be allowed to go to the Faroes because you don't approve of something some people have been allowed to do. Hope I have misunderstood that.
It’s exactly what he’s saying and why I call his approach arrogant.
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
Starmer has zero chance of being PM, save your money, unless he gains 45+ Seats at next election his party won’t give him another chance. And he ain’t getting that many being poster boy for remain and second ref.
Not that the party is going to dump this loser before the next election. Looks like Labour has to go through the next election and hopefully find an electable leader afterwards, one who can put being a remainer party behind them and attract Lexits back. Though it won’t be easy, it’s a long way back from the electoral mess they are in, a lot has to unwind. It’s going to take time.
And to answer the other question, if Hartlepool bi election held today would result be different? No. Current polling shouts at us no. The Lexits who now vote Tory are not turning back, many of them gone for good. All those polls showing Boris had a great week last week, the electorate love what he’s doing - that’s his Lexits achieving that for him.
Of course he has a chance of becoming PM.
Heck, you and @HYUFD and even @Leon have a chance of becoming PM.
The question is really, what chance?
And then you have to ask youself some questions:
Will Boris be PM at the next election?
Probably yes, absent ill health, dire polling, or something out of the blue. Let's say it's an 85% chance.
Will Starmer be Leader of the Labour Party at the next election?
Probably yes too, simply because there's no obvious replacement. I'm going with 75%.
Will the Conservatives fail to win a majority, and will Labour be near enough to form a coalition with others and install Starmer?
Unlikely. I've said I think the Conservatives are 65% to win next time around - but that includes the scenario when Boris has gone. If Boris is PM, it's because he (and his party) thinks he's going to win. So, let's say 70% chance of Conservative majority if Boris is PM. Plus, of course, there are a number of Conservative minority situations where Conservatives plus UUP/DUP is around 324 seats, which probably adds about percent or two. And there's also the scenario where there's no conceivable coalition and therefore there's another election.
So, finger in the air, I'd say he has a 23% chance of becoming PM if both he and Boris are in their jobs in 2024.
.85 * .75 * . 23 = 15% chance of being next PM, which makes 21% a sell.
Personally, I'd sell Rishi here too.
No. This isn’t one where statistical math can save you, otherwise we can all be rich on political betting. It’s one where you either have a “feel” for what’s going out there or not.
Are Labour making inroads bringing Lexits back from the Tory’s? The answer is no. Are Labour proactive about all the reasons people won’t vote for them at next election? The answer is no. Hell no in fact, on this very blog last night Nick Palmer couldn’t see any reason for Starmer to dump Angela Rayner out the way before the next election. Dicky had his Henry, Maggie her willie, Blair his thumper. Starmer his Ang? 😂 The fact Nick and other Labour members on here just can’t see the necessity of changing her for a vote winner rather than loser is exactly why Starmer has zero chance. To go back to yes minister, the Starmer Project has no killer instinct.
To change the world you must first reform your own spirit. Starmer does nothing about Rayner. He has members on the NEC calling Priti Patel racist, and Starmer does nothing.
If this was 1985 you would argue Labour had a statistical chance of winning the following election. If you had a feel on the ground what was really happening you would have known their chance was zero.
Not only this there’s the trans issue and trans activism issue that he ignores too that @cyclefree refers to a few posts above.
Also the anti-Trans activism issue that too many people ignore.
If you want an example of a completely unwinnable battle for a political party - Trans and anti-Trans activism is one such battle.
Is this going to have an impact at Constituency level eg Canterbury /Rosie Duffield.
Will the Tories be able to quietly benefit from that (by keeping quiet and saying positive), as they have generally with AS.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Or else what?
Well, they have a lovely large tourist industry - relative to their size - which sells the Faroes as this amazing, unspoiled, Edenic destination. Shame if something ever happened to that industry, like a worldwide boycott ensuring its collapse
You seem to be saying that I shouldn't be allowed to go to the Faroes because you don't approve of something some people have been allowed to do. Hope I have misunderstood that.
As I said to Taz, please ignore me. But look at the photos I linked, and decide for yourself
Personally, I’ve always wanted to visit the Faroes. They are meant to be amazing. But I won’t go now, not unless they stop this shit. Personal choice, is all
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
You are extremely arrogant, and typical of the neocon mindset.
Your views are right and must be imposed by fair means or foul.
Sod other cultures traditions if they offend white middle class arrogant western sensibilities.
Engaging is the best way.
Tell you what, ignore me. I don’t mind. But look at the photos I linked, and decide how you feel
I don’t approve, I don’t agree, but I don’t care for your ranting, rabid, virtue signalling and demands they change something you don’t like. I’d rather engage with them.
You are clearly confusing disagreeing with your approach with agreeing or supporting what they are doing.
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
UK natural gas wholesale prices are ***jumping ~20% today*** to fresh record high as trades brace for more UK gas-fired power station demand after the loss of a key electricity interconnector between UK and France
UK natural gas wholesale prices are ***jumping ~20% today*** to fresh record high as trades brace for more UK gas-fired power station demand after the loss of a key electricity interconnector between UK and France
Hah! Following our recent short break in London Mrs P and I were both pinged yesterday (the 14th) for a covid contact on the 8th - six days earlier!
Six days seems very slow - how is that going to help?
We've no symptoms and we already took lateral flow test on Friday when we returned home but now both have to do a PCR test of course. Pretty sure we don't have covid though.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Or else what?
Well, they have a lovely large tourist industry - relative to their size - which sells the Faroes as this amazing, unspoiled, Edenic destination. Shame if something ever happened to that industry, like a worldwide boycott ensuring its collapse
You seem to be saying that I shouldn't be allowed to go to the Faroes because you don't approve of something some people have been allowed to do. Hope I have misunderstood that.
As I said to Taz, please ignore me. But look at the photos I linked, and decide for yourself
Personally, I’ve always wanted to visit the Faroes. They are meant to be amazing. But I won’t go now, not unless they stop this shit. Personal choice, is all
Mate, you post stuff you’ll get called out. Just saying ‘ignore me’ won’t wash.
Council tax going up, NI going up, income tax thresholds being frozen, jump in fuel prices, large jump in energy prices, all round price inflation, squeeze on public spending post-Covid... possibly an interest rate rise to dampen it down.
Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly.
Why did Brown lose in 2010?
It wasn't because of the Financial Crash. It was because the Tories successfully pinned the blame for the financial crash onto Labour. It was a political defeat.
You paint a picture of rocky times ahead, but regardless of what I might think about Johnson's handling of the pandemic or Brexit, the Opposition would have to pin the blame on Johnson for him to suffer electorally. My sense is that people generally pin the blame on the virus, because the Opposition have failed to win the political argument.
In difficult times who will voters trust? Will they trust the politician who delivered Brexit and vaccines, as promised, to steer them through this latest crisis? Or will they trust a politician so scared of divisions within his own party that he won't tell the voters what he stands for?
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Or else what?
Well, they have a lovely large tourist industry - relative to their size - which sells the Faroes as this amazing, unspoiled, Edenic destination. Shame if something ever happened to that industry, like a worldwide boycott ensuring its collapse
You seem to be saying that I shouldn't be allowed to go to the Faroes because you don't approve of something some people have been allowed to do. Hope I have misunderstood that.
As I said to Taz, please ignore me. But look at the photos I linked, and decide for yourself
Personally, I’ve always wanted to visit the Faroes. They are meant to be amazing. But I won’t go now, not unless they stop this shit. Personal choice, is all
Other countries do it as well, of course. Inc Japan.
See below for gut-wrenching mass slaughter of the magnificent and beautiful tuna:
UK natural gas wholesale prices are ***jumping ~20% today*** to fresh record high as trades brace for more UK gas-fired power station demand after the loss of a key electricity interconnector between UK and France
There has been a fire at our IFA interconnector site in #Sellindge and emergency services are in attendance. The site has been evacuated and the safety of our staff, emergency teams and local residents is our highest priority. We will provide a further update in due course.
Hah! Following our recent short break in London Mrs P and I were both pinged yesterday (the 14th) for a covid contact on the 8th - six days earlier!
Six days seems very slow - how is that going to help?
We've no symptoms and we already took lateral flow test on Friday when we returned home but now both have to do a PCR test of course. Pretty sure we don't have covid though.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
You are extremely arrogant, and typical of the neocon mindset.
Your views are right and must be imposed by fair means or foul.
Sod other cultures traditions if they offend white middle class arrogant western sensibilities.
Engaging is the best way.
Tell you what, ignore me. I don’t mind. But look at the photos I linked, and decide how you feel
I don’t approve, I don’t agree, but I don’t care for your ranting, rabid, virtue signalling and demands they change something you don’t like. I’d rather engage with them.
You are clearly confusing disagreeing with your approach with agreeing or supporting what they are doing.
The images make me sick, and angry. I confess this is true. I’m not ‘virtue signaling’ tho. My ‘rabid’ ranting is sincere. As I said, just ignore me
One of the Faroese guys laughing as he ineptly chops a dolphin to death is wearing a Che tee shirt. The depths of irony
Council tax going up, NI going up, income tax thresholds being frozen, jump in fuel prices, large jump in energy prices, all round price inflation, squeeze on public spending post-Covid... possibly an interest rate rise to dampen it down.
Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly.
Not sure. Talked to a few strong Tories over the weekend, post the tax rise news. The responses can be summarised as: "The pandemic has cost a fortune - of course taxes were going to rise. What did people expect".
“ Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly. “
For all those not thinking properly people, who think all an opposition has to do to gain government is Pfaff around with balloons and wait for a recession to come along, 1992 says hello.
UPDATE light bulb moment, send Starmer and Rayner into their potting sheds instead of campaigning, so they cannot cost Labour votes. NOTE this actually happened
I am dreadful at predicting these things but my one observation is that several of the predicted reshuffle casualties are also people who are extremely loyal, have acted as useful lightning rods for scandals and could be dangerous on the backbench. Not immaterial.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
This is becoming increasingly common week by week.
It puts pressure on those who don't to do the same less they attract the finger of suspicion as "transphobic".
Hah! Following our recent short break in London Mrs P and I were both pinged yesterday (the 14th) for a covid contact on the 8th - six days earlier!
Six days seems very slow - how is that going to help?
We've no symptoms and we already took lateral flow test on Friday when we returned home but now both have to do a PCR test of course. Pretty sure we don't have covid though.
You still have the App!
We do. Country bumpkins, eh? Still, somebody else must've had switched on it in Soho too!
I'd forgotten about the Faroes as a tourist destination. It's sounds interesting and out of the ordinary. Not one for our piscine friends though.
Cetacean, to be PB-pedantic.
Reminds me of eating dinner in a Chinese restaurant in Montrose years ago with the TV on and the pilot whale hunt du jour being shown in lavish detail and great length.
Edit: I see the tuna have come into the discussion. Not Faroese fish, though.
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
Cabinet is on reshuffle red alert, partly because the official drivers have been told to ready to ferry ministers at short notice. “I am hearing it could come later today and tomorrow” said one senior member of the government.
He should have done it sooner, since it's been in the offing for ages - now it'll be portrayed as partly in a 'panic' because god forbid the government should fall behind at some point.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Or else what?
Well, they have a lovely large tourist industry - relative to their size - which sells the Faroes as this amazing, unspoiled, Edenic destination. Shame if something ever happened to that industry, like a worldwide boycott ensuring its collapse
You seem to be saying that I shouldn't be allowed to go to the Faroes because you don't approve of something some people have been allowed to do. Hope I have misunderstood that.
As I said to Taz, please ignore me. But look at the photos I linked, and decide for yourself
Personally, I’ve always wanted to visit the Faroes. They are meant to be amazing. But I won’t go now, not unless they stop this shit. Personal choice, is all
Other countries do it as well, of course. Inc Japan.
See below for gut-wrenching mass slaughter of the magnificent and beautiful tuna:
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
This is becoming increasingly common week by week.
It puts pressure on those who don't to do the same less they attract the finger of suspicion as "transphobic".
Just come off of LinkedIn?
I was on it for about 10 years - I never saw a single benefit. Cancelled my logon when they gave all the passwords away.
Council tax going up, NI going up, income tax thresholds being frozen, jump in fuel prices, large jump in energy prices, all round price inflation, squeeze on public spending post-Covid... possibly an interest rate rise to dampen it down.
Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly.
Why did Brown lose in 2010?
It wasn't because of the Financial Crash. It was because the Tories successfully pinned the blame for the financial crash onto Labour. It was a political defeat.
You paint a picture of rocky times ahead, but regardless of what I might think about Johnson's handling of the pandemic or Brexit, the Opposition would have to pin the blame on Johnson for him to suffer electorally. My sense is that people generally pin the blame on the virus, because the Opposition have failed to win the political argument.
In difficult times who will voters trust? Will they trust the politician who delivered Brexit and vaccines, as promised, to steer them through this latest crisis? Or will they trust a politician so scared of divisions within his own party that he won't tell the voters what he stands for?
Well, people certainly don't trust Boris but they do at least half-like him or are entertained by him. I think his government is shambolic and incompetent, myself, with a few bright spots of talent. It would be hugely improved by a new Conservative leader, which is why I support one.
Labour has a very similar problem. Starmer is a dud and what's keeping Boris in office at present.
Council tax going up, NI going up, income tax thresholds being frozen, jump in fuel prices, large jump in energy prices, all round price inflation, squeeze on public spending post-Covid... possibly an interest rate rise to dampen it down.
Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly.
Not sure. Talked to a few strong Tories over the weekend, post the tax rise news. The responses can be summarised as: "The pandemic has cost a fortune - of course taxes were going to rise. What did people expect".
“ Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly. “
For all those not thinking properly people, who think all an opposition has to do to gain government is Pfaff around with balloons and wait for a recession to come along, 1992 says hello.
UPDATE light bulb moment, send Starmer and Rayner into their potting sheds instead of campaigning, so they cannot cost Labour votes. NOTE this actually happened
Your last point is their best tactic. As Starmer well knows. That's why he's doing it.
Mr/Ms (I'm sorry, I'm terribly at remembering certain people) Moonshine, it's fascinating to consider whether aliens are likely to be friendly or aggressive.
Also irrelevant, as they're likely to be orders of magnitude more powerful than we are.
They could also be orders of magnitude smaller than us.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
You are extremely arrogant, and typical of the neocon mindset.
Your views are right and must be imposed by fair means or foul.
Sod other cultures traditions if they offend white middle class arrogant western sensibilities.
Engaging is the best way.
Tell you what, ignore me. I don’t mind. But look at the photos I linked, and decide how you feel
I don’t approve, I don’t agree, but I don’t care for your ranting, rabid, virtue signalling and demands they change something you don’t like. I’d rather engage with them.
You are clearly confusing disagreeing with your approach with agreeing or supporting what they are doing.
The images make me sick, and angry. I confess this is true. I’m not ‘virtue signaling’ tho. My ‘rabid’ ranting is sincere. As I said, just ignore me
One of the Faroese guys laughing as he ineptly chops a dolphin to death is wearing a Che tee shirt. The depths of irony
if you're not vegan you've got just as much blood on your hands.
Lesbian dating agencies have plenty of ‘trans women’ on them. Which is fine if they want that but it is the guilt shaming and torrent of abuse they get for wishing to enjoy a single sex attraction and abuse as ‘vagina fetishists’
Oddly gay men don’t seem to get the same level of abuse about dating trans men.
'Vagina fetishists'? Perhaps that'll be coopted as the term for 'traditional' lesbians. Either way its a bloody bizarre term of abuse.
The effective combination he had was 1) actually changing the Conservative party 2) setting out a plan of what he wanted to do 3) being entirely comfortable with being David Cameron.
See also Tony Blair, and - dare I say it - Boris Johnson.
Mr/Ms (I'm sorry, I'm terribly at remembering certain people) Moonshine, it's fascinating to consider whether aliens are likely to be friendly or aggressive.
Also irrelevant, as they're likely to be orders of magnitude more powerful than we are.
Not sure I’ve ever said! Mr.
Yes indeed. They might be friendly to us so long as we stay where we are. We are generally pretty agnostic to crocodiles when they stay in the Congo river. If they figured out how to build a helicopter and started wandering about the Birmingham Bull Ring they’d get dispatched pretty sharpish.
Pretty clear to me now that Senator Nelson’s “tangible UFOs” have been around for a very long time indeed and we are still here. So that’s something in the “friendly little fella” column. Assuming that they are being actively controlled and are not a self powered and self piloted relic technology of a long extinct civilisation, terrestrial or otherwise.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
This is becoming increasingly common week by week.
It puts pressure on those who don't to do the same less they attract the finger of suspicion as "transphobic".
Just come off of LinkedIn?
I was on it for about 10 years - I never saw a single benefit. Cancelled my logon when they gave all the passwords away.
In some industries LinkedIn is important for finding work. If you're not on there you may as well not exist.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Yes, the world needs more arrogant white western nations dictating their will to remote communities. Worked so well so far.
Perhaps engaging with them may be a better Approach than just telling them.
It’s not ‘arrogance’. Ffs. It’s basic humanity. Also the Faroes are themselves a wealthy white western nation. Much wealthier than us, per capita
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
You are extremely arrogant, and typical of the neocon mindset.
Your views are right and must be imposed by fair means or foul.
Sod other cultures traditions if they offend white middle class arrogant western sensibilities.
Engaging is the best way.
Tell you what, ignore me. I don’t mind. But look at the photos I linked, and decide how you feel
I don’t approve, I don’t agree, but I don’t care for your ranting, rabid, virtue signalling and demands they change something you don’t like. I’d rather engage with them.
You are clearly confusing disagreeing with your approach with agreeing or supporting what they are doing.
The images make me sick, and angry. I confess this is true. I’m not ‘virtue signaling’ tho. My ‘rabid’ ranting is sincere. As I said, just ignore me
One of the Faroese guys laughing as he ineptly chops a dolphin to death is wearing a Che tee shirt. The depths of irony
if you're not vegan you've got just as much blood on your hands.
As I get older my meat eating troubles me more - the more I learn. I might one day end up vegan.
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
So not only are SAGE cooking up utterly laughable scenarios to scare people with again, they're also publishing false data to suggest vaccines lose effectiveness over time.
I am afraid that you are missing the point. Stonewall is not a reliable source because it now has a very specific agenda, namely, to abolish sex as a protected characteristic and sex-based rights under the Equality Act. The statistics about threats of suicide amongst young people claiming to be trans have been debunked - see the recent Alex Massie article on this in the Times. The recent Sonia Appleby whistleblowing case in relation to the Tavistock Centre and how it deals with children is well worth a read, not least because it sheds light on some of the very dubious behaviour of organisations like Mermaids. Ditto the Keira Bell case. The experimentation on children claiming to be dysphoric, many of whom are autistic and/or gay, using untested drugs with horrific and irreversible side effects with scarce regard for the Gillick comepetence test is an absolute scandal.
It is not simply one MP who has been attacked. There was a recent Pride March in Manchester where a gay man was attacked by the marchers and had to be escorted off by the police for his own safety. At that same march one of the marching female vicars claimed that gender ideology meant that homosexuality did not exist. Lesbians have been attacked - here and in France - for asserting that same sex attraction is real and that men with penises are not women or lesbians no matter what they say or feel. There is an undeniable homophobic element to the gender ideology movement because it denies that sex matters, one reason why lesbians and some gay people have founded their own separate organisation because they no longer feel that Stonewall represents their interests. In the recent London Pride march there were banners calling for JK Rowling to be killed with no action taken. In the US a man walked into a spa naked with an erect penis and claimed to be trans. In fact it turned out he was a sexual predator with a history of offending who has now been charged. When the story first came out the pro-trans lobby attacked the women who complained accusing them of fascism and a whole load besides but have been very silent when the facts since came out. In Scotland the male trans head of a rape charity has stated that rape victims need to be "cleansed" of their transphobic views before accessing the charity's services. Just pause on that - women who have been attacked by men need to be cleansed of their views because they must be transphobic if they do not want a male counsellor to help them through their trauma. A woman asking about the single sex exemptions under the Equality Act was thrown out of the meeting.
Manchester. The man turned up to a pro-trans event in anti-trans tee shirt. He was jeered and had his hat nicked. Not great but hardly as presented. And both sides are guilty of abusing stats. Eg the "48% of transwomen in prison are in for sex crimes" as featured on here the other day, this one should carry an enormous health warning, as is obvious when you dig into it, yet it's been used to float all sorts of prejudiced garbage. And as for homophobia you should just see some of the stuff posted by some of the more extreme anti-trans obsessives (mainly blokes of a highly unreconstructed nature). There is simply no question that these are the sort of people who would have been battling against gay (or any minority apart from bigots) rights every step of the way. They probably still would be if they hadn't latched onto this. You make some great points, cyclefree, and put them well, and we're aren't as much at odds on this issue as it might appear, when it comes to what to do in practice, but boy are you a long way from being balanced. Which is fair enough, why argue the opposite case to the one you wish to push?, but I point this out in case people on here think otherwise. They should DTOR.
He turned up to Manchester Pride in an LGB Alliance cap and shirt. LGB Alliance are not anti trans, they are pro same sex.
Indeed they are being targeted by pro trans fanatics attacking their charitable status through the courts for no better reason than to silence them.
You want bigotry. Read this.
Www.terfisaslur.com
That site is horrendous.
Shocking.
Little short of a terrorist group. Anti-science and rationality - spouting delusion:
"Acknowledging the existence of female biology is transphobic or cissexist"
Reality is full of ideological let downs unfortunately.
UK natural gas wholesale prices are ***jumping ~20% today*** to fresh record high as trades brace for more UK gas-fired power station demand after the loss of a key electricity interconnector between UK and France
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Or else what?
Well, they have a lovely large tourist industry - relative to their size - which sells the Faroes as this amazing, unspoiled, Edenic destination. Shame if something ever happened to that industry, like a worldwide boycott ensuring its collapse
You seem to be saying that I shouldn't be allowed to go to the Faroes because you don't approve of something some people have been allowed to do. Hope I have misunderstood that.
As I said to Taz, please ignore me. But look at the photos I linked, and decide for yourself
Personally, I’ve always wanted to visit the Faroes. They are meant to be amazing. But I won’t go now, not unless they stop this shit. Personal choice, is all
Other countries do it as well, of course. Inc Japan.
See below for gut-wrenching mass slaughter of the magnificent and beautiful tuna:
I only ever eat sustainable fish, if at all possible (sometimes abroad it’s not possible to know)
The industrialized fishing of tuna is grisly, but at least the tuna are eaten. And the noble tuna is not a highly intelligent mammal like the dolphin
The pointless slaughter of 1400 dolphins for no other reason than sadistic pleasure is in a different and darker moral place
Tuna, as a species, is far more threatened than dolphins are. But I agree that slaughtering a wild mammal seems even more grisly to us than slaughtering a fish.
Loss of biodiversity is the most worrying environmental threat for me, it makes one wonder how much degradation it will take before our species stops. A rhetorical question because it never will.
Hearing that Boris Johnson will reshuffle his top team after PMQs.
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office - Dowden to Education - Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland - Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS - Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
So not only are SAGE cooking up utterly laughable scenarios to scare people with again, they're also publishing false data to suggest vaccines lose effectiveness over time.
It's not false data, just an older version of the plot.
UK natural gas wholesale prices are ***jumping ~20% today*** to fresh record high as trades brace for more UK gas-fired power station demand after the loss of a key electricity interconnector between UK and France
I don't see anything suspicious about this at all. Haiti's Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been banned from leaving the country amid an investigation into his alleged involvement in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
A prosecutor is seeking charges against Mr Henry, who has been asked to explain his links with a key suspect in the killing, Joseph Felix Badio.
Records show the two men had multiple phone calls just hours after the assassination, prosecutors say...
On Monday, Mr Henry sent a letter purportedly sacking Chief Prosecutor Bed-Ford Claude and accusing him of a "serious administrative offence". He later nominated a replacement.
However, on Tuesday Mr Claude appeared to remain in his post as he asked a judge investigating the murder of Mr Moïse to charge the prime minister over his "suspected" involvement in the case.
Sources with knowledge of Haiti say it is not in the prime minister's remit to dismiss the prosecutor.
What’s does “sources with knowledge of Haiti” actually mean?
I know Haiti exists*. Therefore I have knowledge of Haiti.
* although, on second thoughts, I have never been there so - more correctly - I believe Haiti exists
If Haiti doesn't exist, then there's a very big Haiti-sized hole in my atlas...
In all seriousness, has any country had such a bedevilled history as Haiti?
I read about it recently in contrast with its neighbour on Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, which has had its fair share of major troubles, political and otherwise, yet despite it starting out with Haiti seeming the stronger, development in the last 50 years has seen it be in a much stronger position (albeit not strong in global terms).
Cabinet is on reshuffle red alert, partly because the official drivers have been told to ready to ferry ministers at short notice. “I am hearing it could come later today and tomorrow” said one senior member of the government.
He should have done it sooner, since it's been in the offing for ages - now it'll be portrayed as partly in a 'panic' because god forbid the government should fall behind at some point.
Are there any examples of government reshuffles improving things? OK, you have to do them from time to time (let the cream rise, ditch the dregs), but from memory they normally create more problems than they solve. You create some unhappy bunnies and new ministers take time to get up to speed.
So not only are SAGE cooking up utterly laughable scenarios to scare people with again, they're also publishing false data to suggest vaccines lose effectiveness over time.
It's not false data, just an older version of the plot.
It was out of date at the time of publishing. To say it didn't used to be false is little comfort.
Lesbian dating agencies have plenty of ‘trans women’ on them. Which is fine if they want that but it is the guilt shaming and torrent of abuse they get for wishing to enjoy a single sex attraction and abuse as ‘vagina fetishists’
Oddly gay men don’t seem to get the same level of abuse about dating trans men.
'Vagina fetishists'? Perhaps that'll be coopted as the term for 'traditional' lesbians. Either way its a bloody bizarre term of abuse.
Abuse because of ones' sexual preference was wrong in the past, and it's wrong now.
So not only are SAGE cooking up utterly laughable scenarios to scare people with again, they're also publishing false data to suggest vaccines lose effectiveness over time.
It's not false data, just an older version of the plot.
It was out of date at the time of publishing. To say it didn't used to be false is little comfort.
Was it? The pre-print came out yesterday. I'm sorry, but it's not false, and the two datasets are even consistent with one another.
Council tax going up, NI going up, income tax thresholds being frozen, jump in fuel prices, large jump in energy prices, all round price inflation, squeeze on public spending post-Covid... possibly an interest rate rise to dampen it down.
Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly.
Not sure. Talked to a few strong Tories over the weekend, post the tax rise news. The responses can be summarised as: "The pandemic has cost a fortune - of course taxes were going to rise. What did people expect".
But it's neither strong Tories not strong Labourites who win and lose elections; its the floaters and stay at homers. There is no shoe-in ATM for 2023/4. Both Tories getting 326+, and no-one doing so are pretty equally balanced. All other results are out of sight.
That might make the Tories just about the favourite to form the next government, and easily for most seats, but they have no friends to form a government with as things stand if they drop below c326.
It will be interesting up in the Red Wall come in 2023.
Will the real pocket book economics of things like the UC cut be weighed as more important than a load bluster and hot air about cultural issues, now that Brexit is done.
Excellent point by Starmer pointing out that the real tax rate on the low paid is over 75%
Boris just waffling unable to answer, because there is no answer.
It is incredulous that any civilised country could tax the poorest over 75%. Absolutely nobody, let alone the poorest, should face a tax rate over 50%.
The reason I think you are missing the point is this. No-one denies that those people who are genuinely dysphoric need help and resources and to be free from attack and prejudice. I absolutely share your concern about this. If trans activists were genuinely concerned about this, they would be campaigning loudly for more resources for dysphoric people. But they aren't. They are focusing on attacking women who raise concerns and this comes across to women as little more than male bullying and men telling women what being a women is.
But the issue is that if you have effective self-ID with no independent objective verifiable gatekeeping of whether someone really is dysphoric then it provides a bloody great loophole for men who are not trans saying that they are in order to access and attack women. And there is plenty of evidence that sexual predators will do just that and are doing so - in prisons and elsewhere.
The other point is this: 80% of genuine transwomen do not have surgery so they remain with a male body. They have the strength and and ability of a man and there is no way of distinguishing between a man with a male body and a man who has gender dysphoria. So that is why - as a matter of safeguarding - you keep all male bodies out of women only spaces. Otherwise you can have no effective safeguarding.
If anyone can identify themselves into a category, then that category ceases to exist. And the rights based on that category - not to be discriminated against - effectively cease to exist. That is the concern women have. Womanhood is not a feeling. It is an objective biological and scientific fact and those who claim that women have penises and men have cervixes and that a man can, just like that, say he is a woman and access women's services is talking nonsense.
One final fact for you: the majority of men claiming to be trans in prisons in the U.K. at the moment are men who have been convicted of sexual offences against women and children. They were not trans when they were free and committing their offences. But they did somehow claim to be this when they got locked up. They do not have gender recognition certificates. They have not gone though any sort of transition. They have not been medically diagnosed. Odd that. And that is why women are concerned - that this is a loophole which puts them at risk, a very real risk, as the High Court recently recognised.
As this is a subject which does not interest everyone I post here the attached helpful guide - written by a woman, a teacher, a Labour Party member of long standing and married to a transwoman. So someone who knows rather more than most the realities around this topic - https://gcritical.org/introduction/.
Thanks so much for posting all this. Its one hell of an issue where as every opinion seems to generate rage from one group or another I tend to stay away. And that is despite my eldest now identifying as non-binary and in their* second relationship with a trans man.
*WTF is this "they/they're bullshit? As the person in question is not plural (or gestalt, or schizophrenic) why is the apparent pronoun for a non-binary person plural? I had no problem with the name change (as I didn't have anything to do with the birth name chosen anyway...) but the pronoun thing drives me nuts. As does the lack of a neutral alternative to son/daughter that isn't archaic like issue / progeny / offspring / scion etc
OK. Whine over.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
I’ve noticed on LinkedIn people putting pronouns on their profiles. Someone at work even has theirs in their sig.
This is becoming increasingly common week by week.
It puts pressure on those who don't to do the same less they attract the finger of suspicion as "transphobic".
I don't think anyone will really mind until it becomes policy that you must do it at somewhere high profile of significant (though perhaps I am wrong and it already is with some). I've definitely seen an increase of it in the last year, but it isn't a requirement yet.
I don’t want to bang on, but the details of that Faroese dolphin hunt are truly distressing. Using jet skis and speedboats they pursued this huge, tiring pod of dolphins for hours. Eventually cornering them on that beach, where they were incompetently slaughtered by fools. Some taking ages to die
One thousand five hundred dolphins
I can understand why a poor, primitive society might need to hunt cetaceans to get by. The Faroese are enormously rich. They’re not going to starve whatever they kill. They can’t eat 1500 dolphins, anyway
So it was mass killing for the sake of mass killing. The joy of sadistic butchery. What the Hell
I don’t normally get that exercised by ‘ecological’ issues but this is horrible.
Nick Palmer! This is your job. The world needs to tell the Faroes: Stop, or else
Or else what?
Well, they have a lovely large tourist industry - relative to their size - which sells the Faroes as this amazing, unspoiled, Edenic destination. Shame if something ever happened to that industry, like a worldwide boycott ensuring its collapse
You seem to be saying that I shouldn't be allowed to go to the Faroes because you don't approve of something some people have been allowed to do. Hope I have misunderstood that.
As I said to Taz, please ignore me. But look at the photos I linked, and decide for yourself
Personally, I’ve always wanted to visit the Faroes. They are meant to be amazing. But I won’t go now, not unless they stop this shit. Personal choice, is all
Other countries do it as well, of course. Inc Japan.
See below for gut-wrenching mass slaughter of the magnificent and beautiful tuna:
I only ever eat sustainable fish, if at all possible (sometimes abroad it’s not possible to know)
The industrialized fishing of tuna is grisly, but at least the tuna are eaten. And the noble tuna is not a highly intelligent mammal like the dolphin
The pointless slaughter of 1400 dolphins for no other reason than sadistic pleasure is in a different and darker moral place
Tuna, as a species, is far more threatened than dolphins are. But I agree that slaughtering a wild mammal seems even more grisly to us than slaughtering a fish.
Loss of biodiversity is the most worrying environmental threat for me, it makes one wonder how much degradation it will take before our species stops. A rhetorical question because it never will.
Yes. Loss of biodiversity is a bleak and depressing thing. I’m a big fan of rewilding
Incidentally, last week in Lucerne I saw a sign saying ‘look out for beavers!’ - in the middle of the city
My guide explained they were reintroduced years back, and ‘now we have so many they are a problem’. But that’s a better problem than having no beavers at all
Tories into 39 with another pollster. Down down down
Labours Lexit glass ceiling. Stuck stuck stuck.
Labour down on that as well. They are just going nowhere
Why should they go anywhere? They lost squillions of long serving votes to the Tories and are doing ZILCH, NIHIL, ABSOLUTELY NOWT to convince them to come back. If the government is rubbish (the last couple weeks they have been brilliant at protecting their 2019 voters) the worst that will happen is the voters Torys will keep again at the next election will merely go shy as don’t knows for mid term.
The disastrous position Labour find themselves in they need to be very very active at showing a government in waiting.
This is what the lost voters need to see for starters:
1. The leadership needs to show it has killer instinct the public are looking for, Starmer needs to put some underperforming heads on spikes ASAP - starting with Angela Rayner, Ashworth, Griffith, Smith.
2. Starmer needs to put poster boy of Remain and 2nd ref behind him, Starmer needs to communicate to the Lexits how he is going to build on the success of Brexit to level up their community and bring the good old days back. If he doesn’t do that he doesn’t get the vote back in the places he needs it.
The long-serving voters lost to the Tories are going to be difficult to get back because they are ideologically conservative in many ways and always have been. The spell is broken.
Labour's hope is that he LDs can draw sufficient voters from the CP to deny the latter a majority.
SKS as PM is often interpreted as a done deal, if the Tories have been denied a bare majority.
What parties always say before the GE is always we won't be doing any deals.
What parties say after the election is determined by the arithmetic
The electorate have spoken and they don't want another election immediately. And the parties now have to sort it out.
If SKS has done well enough so that Lab + LibDems + Green can form a coalition, he will be fine. But, I don't seen any other combination being very viable.
If the Tories have lost their majority but remain the largest party, then they will be fine if they can buy another party off. And there will be parties willing to trade, no matter what they say now. Especially, as they can probably claim Boris' head.
Good God yes. "They" as use for a single person winds me right up. This predates the trans wars - from the 90s or thereabouts 'they' has been used to refer to a person whose sex you don't know, to avoid the clunky 'his or hers'. Once upon a time, we had a term for singular/gender ambiguous: it was 'his'. 'His' could mean either 'his' in its modern sense or 'his or hers'. But it fell out of favour for understandable reasons. 'It' is the gender-neutral term, but I can understand why it isn't used in this instance. Though if 'it' had historically been the term to use for 'his or hers' it wouldn't have its slightly pejorative overtones now.
Without venturing into the intense debate on this issue, I think that anyone who gets worked up about language change is on a loser. I'm still resistant to "bored of" instead of "bored by", but I recognise that English has moved on and will get over it. Cookie implicitly concedes they (ha) don't have a viable alternative suggestion. There are some really difficult issues here, but the English language ain't one of them.
Oh I do (implicitly concede) that Nick. It would be very useful to have had a viable alternative back in the days when we needed it only for 'I may be referring to either a man or a woman'. Though in all honesty - I am a middle aged suburban northerner after all - I can't help feeling that anyone who rejects the use of both 'he' and 'she' is being a tad self-indulgent. But that is a separate point. The point is that 'they' already means something else and when you use it to mean a single person you are using it wrongly. (And if you use it to refer to a single person, you should be saying 'They is', not 'They are'.)
But anyway, we SHOULD rail against the lazy or inaccurate use of language. I will happily join you in your crusade against 'bored of'. Similarly, I always flinch slightly at 'try and' rather than 'try to'. And I will silently seethe at the use of 'disinterested' to mean 'indifferent'. (I cannot enjoy the Elbow album 'The Seldom Seen Kid' until after the first two minutes, which I spend cringing with anticipation of the lyric 'a weary and disinterested sigh'.) I don't mind ADDING to language. But losing perfectly serviceable words because someone has decided those words now mean something else upsets me.
You need to get over yourself, it's a great album! Just act 'disinterested'
I had a teacher in primary school who would correct me if I wrote or said "try to", telling me it should be "try and". Took me a few years to unlearn doing it wrong.
I would like a full set of gender neutral pronouns, as I also dislike the singular 'they'.
Comments
Also, the world HAS politely asked them to stop doing this, for many years. They just ignore it. Because this senseless killing (which gets more horrific by the year) is an ‘ancient tradition’. Yes. The ‘ancient tradition’ of pursuing a thousand dolphins on jet skis then using power drills to lazily chop them to death
Enough polite asking. Fuck their tourist industry. That would be a good place to start
We always coped with seasonal labour shortages in the summer with 'make do and mend.' Most of the gangs I worked with in the sixties (in Boston or Vilnius central as it later became) were composed of teenagers like me (in the evenings and school holidays), and women with children who could fit their hours around domestic duties.
Very few men worked on the land as there were always jobs that paid better and were a lot easier in the town The automated tate harvesters hadn't arrived then. Often you sat in the van and didn't get paid when it rained. Fortunately, it's relatively dry on the fens.
I now live in the NW and notice the difference.
I'm not surprised the farmers took advantage of the new labour force in the 2000s. It was becoming harder to persuade the locals to do the jobs.
Labour's view had then become that cheap labour was a good thing because it kept the food prices low. What a change from the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Did they die in vain? Forsaken for their new best mates - metropolitan luvvies.
OK, I exaggerate a touch, but the four Yorkshiremen sketch was funny.
Little short of a terrorist group. Anti-science and rationality - spouting delusion:
"Acknowledging the existence of female biology is transphobic or cissexist"
A toss up between the French and the Belgians
A senior Tory MP tells me the rumoured moves are:
- Gove to Foreign Office
- Dowden to Education
- Gavin Williamson to Northern Ireland
- Nigel Adams (poss) to DCMS
- Simon Hart out, Craig Williams in Wales
https://twitter.com/REWearmouth/status/1438084381067956225?s=20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_United_Kingdom_general_election
Your views are right and must be imposed by fair means or foul.
Sod other cultures traditions if they offend white middle class arrogant western sensibilities.
Engaging is the best way.
I just clicked on the BBC2 politics show, and there's a man with corn in his top pocket!
Get Dura out of retirement to strafe those jet skis. Blow deep sea dredgers out the water. Send in special forces to take out poachers. Etc…
Anyone who thinks another Conservative majority is a shoe-in for 2023/2024 isn't thinking properly.
"lesbian women must consider trans women as potential sexual partners"
https://terfisaslur.com/cotton-ceiling/
Also exactly what highly embarrassing items does Mr Williamson have on Boris that makes him unsackable.
The disastrous position Labour find themselves in they need to be very very active at showing a government in waiting.
This is what the lost voters need to see for starters:
1. The leadership needs to show it has killer instinct the public are looking for, Starmer needs to put some underperforming heads on spikes ASAP - starting with Angela Rayner, Ashworth, Griffith, Smith.
2. Starmer needs to put poster boy of Remain and 2nd ref behind him, Starmer needs to communicate to the Lexits how he is going to build on the success of Brexit to level up their community and bring the good old days back. If he doesn’t do that he doesn’t get the vote back in the places he needs it.
I'd forgotten about the Faroes as a tourist destination. It's sounds interesting and out of the ordinary. Not one for our piscine friends though.
This will get lost in the reshuffle but anyway. Nice little segment with Bill Nelson, Biden’s Nasa administrator, on UFOs. He is of course unusually qualified for the role for a politician, having flown on the Columbia shuttle.
In short: yup UFO’s are real and tangible, rather than recording artefacts. We don’t know what they are, but I sure hope they’re not foreign adversaries given the technology they exhibit. We need to find out what they are and if friend or foe. Of course aliens are out there you dumbo. We have no plan on what do if Contact is initiated by them. Hopefully Spielberg got it right with ET who was “a friendly little fella”.
He also helpfully signposts how Disclosure will likely unfold. First, an exoplanet with signs of organic processes. I guess that will come not long after the James Webb telescope is operational (launches in Oct). Then microbes or fossilised microbes on Mars or Venus. Couple of missions targeting that. Then maybe something on Breakthrough Listen. And finally they’ll say, “you know those things that we told you for several years were here but for weird reasons most of you didn’t want to listen? Well you’d better be listening by now because we know what they are”.
What could possibly go wrong?
Edit: Sorry, late to the party as usual.
The reason this one sticks out is the overwhelming scale of the slaughter - because the Faroese are now so rich they can all afford jet-skis, and join in, and hunt down thousands. In a day. Apparently it makes them feel ‘manly’
It is thought to be the biggest single slaughter of whales/dolphins in recorded history. And it happened this week.
Also irrelevant, as they're likely to be orders of magnitude more powerful than we are.
Oddly gay men don’t seem to get the same level of abuse about dating trans men.
Labour's hope is that he LDs can draw sufficient voters from the CP to deny the latter a majority.
https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1438066309485445128
It’s exactly what he’s saying and why I call his approach arrogant.
Will the Tories be able to quietly benefit from that (by keeping quiet and saying positive), as they have generally with AS.
https://twitter.com/DAaronovitch/status/1438090172009271299?s=20
Personally, I’ve always wanted to visit the Faroes. They are meant to be amazing. But I won’t go now, not unless they stop this shit. Personal choice, is all
You are clearly confusing disagreeing with your approach with agreeing or supporting what they are doing.
accepting money from Russian donors
accepting money from unknown donors
lying
infidelity
arranging for journalists to be beaten up
as those are all in the public domain and have no impact.
Basically Boris has a bumbling toff shield that makes him unembarrassable. Perhaps the dirt is on another senior Tory or the party itself.
Six days seems very slow - how is that going to help?
We've no symptoms and we already took lateral flow test on Friday when we returned home but now both have to do a PCR test of course. Pretty sure we don't have covid though.
Mate, you post stuff you’ll get called out. Just saying ‘ignore me’ won’t wash.
It wasn't because of the Financial Crash. It was because the Tories successfully pinned the blame for the financial crash onto Labour. It was a political defeat.
You paint a picture of rocky times ahead, but regardless of what I might think about Johnson's handling of the pandemic or Brexit, the Opposition would have to pin the blame on Johnson for him to suffer electorally. My sense is that people generally pin the blame on the virus, because the Opposition have failed to win the political argument.
In difficult times who will voters trust? Will they trust the politician who delivered Brexit and vaccines, as promised, to steer them through this latest crisis? Or will they trust a politician so scared of divisions within his own party that he won't tell the voters what he stands for?
See below for gut-wrenching mass slaughter of the magnificent and beautiful tuna:
https://theconversation.com/tuna-or-not-tuna-the-real-cost-of-taking-a-fish-out-of-water-2825
https://twitter.com/nationalgriduk/status/1438049403495923714
One of the Faroese guys laughing as he ineptly chops a dolphin to death is wearing a Che tee shirt. The depths of irony
For all those not thinking properly people, who think all an opposition has to do to gain government is Pfaff around with balloons and wait for a recession to come along, 1992 says hello.
UPDATE light bulb moment, send Starmer and Rayner into their potting sheds instead of campaigning, so they cannot cost Labour votes. NOTE this actually happened
https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1438092418310623238?s=20
It puts pressure on those who don't to do the same less they attract the finger of suspicion as "transphobic".
Reminds me of eating dinner in a Chinese restaurant in Montrose years ago with the TV on and the pilot whale hunt du jour being shown in lavish detail and great length.
Edit: I see the tuna have come into the discussion. Not Faroese fish, though.
(Of course sooner or later one of these rumours will prove true)
The industrialized fishing of tuna is grisly, but at least the tuna are eaten. And the noble tuna is not a highly intelligent mammal like the dolphin
The pointless slaughter of 1400 dolphins for no other reason than sadistic pleasure is in a different and darker moral place
I was on it for about 10 years - I never saw a single benefit. Cancelled my logon when they gave all the passwords away.
Labour has a very similar problem. Starmer is a dud and what's keeping Boris in office at present.
This is more cultish nonsense, pretending physical biology doesn't exist or matter even though it's literally a matter of fact.
Yes indeed. They might be friendly to us so long as we stay where we are. We are generally pretty agnostic to crocodiles when they stay in the Congo river. If they figured out how to build a helicopter and started wandering about the Birmingham Bull Ring they’d get dispatched pretty sharpish.
Pretty clear to me now that Senator Nelson’s “tangible UFOs” have been around for a very long time indeed and we are still here. So that’s something in the “friendly little fella” column. Assuming that they are being actively controlled and are not a self powered and self piloted relic technology of a long extinct civilisation, terrestrial or otherwise.
Hey, I’m on a journey and at least I’ve started
More seriously, Williamson would surely quit rather than take that, it's so clearly a major demotion.
So not only are SAGE cooking up utterly laughable scenarios to scare people with again, they're also publishing false data to suggest vaccines lose effectiveness over time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-15/fire-hits-key-power-converter-station-linking-u-k-to-france
Managed to work up the effort to get a workout in and feeling so much better.
Hope you’re all keeping well.
Loss of biodiversity is the most worrying environmental threat for me, it makes one wonder how much degradation it will take before our species stops. A rhetorical question because it never will.
Whilst transformer fires aren't uncommon, if you wanted to cause economic chaos, damaging the interconnectors would be a good way to go about it.
Lets hope they get it fixed quickly (or the wind picks up).
OK, you have to do them from time to time (let the cream rise, ditch the dregs), but from memory they normally create more problems than they solve. You create some unhappy bunnies and new ministers take time to get up to speed.
Unless anyone knows any different.
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1438096922980519936?s=20
That might make the Tories just about the favourite to form the next government, and easily for most seats, but they have no friends to form a government with as things stand if they drop below c326.
Will the real pocket book economics of things like the UC cut be weighed as more important than a load bluster and hot air about cultural issues, now that Brexit is done.
Boris just waffling unable to answer, because there is no answer.
It is incredulous that any civilised country could tax the poorest over 75%. Absolutely nobody, let alone the poorest, should face a tax rate over 50%.
Incidentally, last week in Lucerne I saw a sign saying ‘look out for beavers!’ - in the middle of the city
My guide explained they were reintroduced years back, and ‘now we have so many they are a problem’. But that’s a better problem than having no beavers at all
What parties always say before the GE is always we won't be doing any deals.
What parties say after the election is determined by the arithmetic
The electorate have spoken and they don't want another election immediately. And the parties now have to sort it out.
If SKS has done well enough so that Lab + LibDems + Green can form a coalition, he will be fine. But, I don't seen any other combination being very viable.
If the Tories have lost their majority but remain the largest party, then they will be fine if they can buy another party off. And there will be parties willing to trade, no matter what they say now. Especially, as they can probably claim Boris' head.
But, I largely agree with @gealbhan 's analysis.
Historically, Labour never get rid of failing leaders in time. And history repeats itself.
I had a teacher in primary school who would correct me if I wrote or said "try to", telling me it should be "try and". Took me a few years to unlearn doing it wrong.
I would like a full set of gender neutral pronouns, as I also dislike the singular 'they'.
@JohnRentoul
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