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Phallic Drift – politicalbetting.com
Phallic Drift – politicalbetting.com
As on here. And in the media. Take Channel 4 news: after interviewing Maya Forstater, they interviewed men from trans groups and 2 sad trans-identified males. What about other trans people interviewed about a judgment which, in paragraph 248, stated:
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Eabhal said:
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Only after it hits the hills. That's why some of the islands like Tiree can have the best weather anywhere in the UK. Malcolm is right about his patch - hence all the golf courses and airfields, similar to Moray.
Glad you agree and take it the way it was meant, Rochdale does not understand Scottish humour.
Come to Ayrshire we even have palm trees at Culzean due to the gulf stream. Is it any wonder Trump has the jewel in his crown in Ayrshire.
1. "Cap asylum numbers" - the only point which isn't unreasonable
2. "Stop paying France" - with what is proposed below?
3. "Detain migrants in gulags" - where? Remember that the Tory government proposed this using disused airbases, only to have Tory MPs - some very senior - scream and howl. The proposal is to build fortified open prison camps, so again my question is where? Staffed by whom? Secured by whom? At what cost?
4. "Oversees processing" at which point he comedically refers to Rwanda which was not oversees processing. I have no objection in principle, but again, where? Staffed by whom? And what is the domestic legal process to render people from the UK to wherever when our courts are underfunded and partially functional?
5. "Go after the people smugglers" - the option the Tories endlessly decried. This is a great idea. Many are in France. Ah, we told france to fuck off in point 2 and are about to do worse in point 6.
6. "Do tow backs" - also known as "drowning". Who will be doing the tow backs? Coast Guard and the Navy are not only not equipped but also pointed out that such orders would be illegal last time this was seriously suggested. Even if you manage to only drown a few boats the rest arrive back into France who would need to be cooperative. See point 2.
You don't need to continue. Your proposals are crayon politics, drawn by a small child in red crayon. As always, the key to policy is that it actually has to be deliverable. Actionable. Realistic, not just "can't we tell these foreigners to fuck off".
Its a great insight into the coming Reform manifesto and deserved further commentary.
Anyone who denies trans people exist, or want to make being trans impossible, can fuck right off.
Thank-you for the header.
Bearing in mind the weather reports, when Ms Cyclefree returns to the Lake District it will be in one of those Chinese flying drone-taxis (has @Leon tried one yet?) which auto-converts to a floating hovercraft bath chair.
From the "small things" department, I can report that ChatGPT has discovered the existence of black shorts, on being told about them.
Not quite there yet - real action men have a rank, and eagle eyes are required for "watching you".
“In the UK, non-white jurors exhibit a strong bias in favor of non-white defendants and against white defendants. White jurors exhibit a far weaker bias - also in favor of non-white defendants.”
https://x.com/artemisconsort/status/1912975002233971002?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
I also have involvement in the trans area. I'm bisexual so I'm part of the LGBTetc community. My eldest (non-binary but biologically male) had a trans boyfriend for a while and they're still close friends. A former colleague and good friend is a trans woman saving up for surgery.
My basic rule with rights is that if they trample on the human rights of other people they aren't rights. I support both the need for female spaces (my wife despises open changing even when everyone has the same genitalia) and to provide dignity and respect for people who genuinely have dysmorphia and are medically working their way through transition.
The problem with the trans debate is the screaming extremists at both ends of the spectrum. Absolutism is usually wrong - issues are not black and white and this one is no different. I do have to float a question though - in the race to be inclusive have we not lost sight of who we are being inclusive of?
I can see a world of difference between people who are seriously and medically altering their bodies to become the gender they believe they really are, and a bloke wearing a frock and a wig. But the trans rights row seems to lump everyone together.
Seriously Malc; you should read some of the stuff that's out there. If this continues another trans person will end up being killed.
Thanks for ripping apart the usual half-witted response when anyone starts challenging some of the anti-immigration rhetoric from the Reform Party and their Conservative acolytes.
Simplistic solutions to complex problems are no solutions at all - if there were easy solutions to reducing immigration and dealing with those already here, even the last Conservative administrations would have implemented them.
I suspect the incoming Labour Government knew all that and their main effort seems to be to try to clear the backlog of asylum cases (Sunak having undone much of Johnson's semi-"open door" policy and made legal immigation (the real issue) much harder).
It's a series of overlapping complex issues which are evolving from not just dealing with the people trying to get in but those who are here and touches on re-migration (voluntary or compulsory repatriation) which will be the next issue and again there's a lot of shouting and griping but no sense of practicality or understanding of impact.
OGH considered it spam by you and very disrespectful that he wrote a thread and you derailed it with your obsession.
US ready to walk away from peace efforts within days, Rubio warns
Some alarming rhetoric coming from the US secretary of state this morning, following his meeting with European partners in Paris yesterday.
Marco Rubio said just moments ago from the French capital that the US will walk away from its efforts to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine unless there are clear signs of progress in the coming days.
"We need to figure out here now, within a matter of days, whether this [peace deal] is doable in the short term, because if it's not, then I think we're just going to move on," he said.
"We're not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end," he added.
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-latest-us-will-move-on-from-ukraine-peace-efforts-if-no-progress-within-days-rubio-warns-12541713
Here is a piece on Lib Dem Voice (for anyone down a hole, perhaps the key platform for activists since 2007 about the verdict, with a few comments. To it catches the tenor of the public conversation amongst activists quite well. That is, a focus on the perceived rights of trans people being the main question, and a bit of a feeling of the Leadership holding back.
There will be other views, but I think this is how I judge the positioning of more vocal activists. That includes, imo, the view of the editor of LDV.
@RochdalePioneers may have a view.
https://www.libdemvoice.org/official-lib-dem-reaction-to-todays-supreme-court-judgement-77376.html
As a management consultant one of my specialities is cutting through the ideas which operationally don't work. The problem with the crayon politics approach is that they are pointless as saying nothing. "Why not just tow them back" indeed.
Take toilets. There aren't enough as it is, so the idea that two categories should become three is pretty unlikely. What happens in the meantime?
Rubio is not stupid, and he must know this. Therefore, he is guilty of lying to try and cover up for his boss, who is stupid and genuinely may not have understood it, and even if he did is such a pathological liar he would have said something else anyway.
This is now.
https://x.com/SCynic1/status/1912973936729403516/photo/1
Whilst Victoria McCloud and Stephen Whittle do not constitute a trans group individually (though possibly collectively), they are certainly trans people, so I think it's true to say that the Supreme Court refused to hear from trans people.
[1] https://goodlawproject.org/crowdfunder/help-protect-trans-peoples-right-to-safety/
Could/can Russia finish the job? Questionable based on their progress to date.
Will/would the USA start interfering in Ukraine's efforts to defend itself. Probably but then the US has a habit of ignoring events until it affects them.
He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwords
Media's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:
https://x.com/mattjay/status/1913023007263543565
It’s like the olden days when being gay was “just a phase”.
And we've thought about that crap idea and it doesn't work won't cut it with the left behind voters Reform is targetting..
Excellent piece as always by @Cyclefree which makes for difficult but thought provoking reading.
If women do not have a right to single sex spaces that means for example if a retailer currntly has some changing rooms for designated to men only and the other changing rooms for women and "any gender(Women and "any gender" have to share the same changing rooms) that is still now legal ?
(which I guess I understand Primark's reasoning but have actually made women less safer as men could technically use the women and "any gender" changing rooms since they are indeed a gender)
Ed Davey said that we accept the judgement in full - sensible as its the Supreme Court. The ruling provides a very useful definition of "what is a woman" so that we can now move on from the tireless virtue signalling about whether a woman can have a penis or not.
What do I think the party should do? Campaign on Something Else.
Despite all the online rhetoric, I've found people to be instinctively "woke". There is a strong tradition of understanding and tolerance when faced with an individual with a name, family, emotions. It's a bit like grumpy old men who claim to hate cats but after a week find themselves the primary provider of food and warmth.
The most workable solution on the boats seems to be agreeing a deal with France where they’re immediately sent back to Calais. To be fair I think this is basically what Farage wants to do but he doesn’t want to make a deal, he just wants to take them back and I assume drop them on the beach.
I am very open to accepting that Labour is failing on this and this is probably the issue that if Labour can’t solve, Farage is likely to come into Number 10 on but can anyone honestly sit here and say that leaving the ECHR and joining Belarus and Russia can be the only way to sort this issue out?
Farage said Brexit would sort out immigration. So was he lying?
The influx of refugees is not a UK issue, its a global issue, and speciifically within Europe we take far far fewer than other countries. So we share a problem with our neighbours - the obvious place to start is to actively work together. You can't pass the parcel on this one.
Then take a step further back. Some refugees are here for money. Others are fleeing war. Sudan was mentioned. So if the west really wants to stop the migrants, invest to make the countries safe and habitable - the Gordon Brown approach.
I'd also face down the most angry. "Tow them back". OK, are you personally prepared to tow the boat back, watch it capsize and the people inside it drown? Can we give you a lifejacket and send you off out into the channel?
Assuming Labour can cut immigration substantially - and I think they will because even they seem to understand what a big problem it is for them - and do something on the boats, then they will be able to go after Reform more considerably.
I’m not convinced this “Farage will privatise the NHS” line is a goer myself.
So your basic rule of rights is not a viable starting point. The point about rights is that sometimes they come into conflict, and striking the balance is always going to be a question. A further point is that someone somewhere is going to test the boundaries of any particular 'right' - as IMO has occurred over trans matters.
I don't know - the Boss has not spoken afaik, but I will stick within quota. For me, there is something of a difference between obvious parody, and purporting to be real.
On a more serious point of AI images, I see that on Full Fact this week they feature a piece on a fake "Daily Mail" front page featuring a photo where Keir Starmer is shown alongside Jimmy Saville on a consistent background, when the photo is what we would have previously called a montage. There is not an indication that it is AI.
That makes me wonder whether we should aim for a good practice of AI generated realistic-appearing images being tagged by reputable sources, in the image and in the metadata embedded in the image. So by default untagged images then become less reputable. There is already provision in metadata standards such as EXIF, IPTC and XMP.
That's an informal regulatory model we use in many areas, where accepting "good practice" can be a useful tool for clarifying naturally grey areas.
Which is precisely what the LibDems do do. And why they kicked the Tories out in both yesterday's by-elections. And why they'll give Farage the same kicking on May 1.
You can't specify anything anatomical as surgery can remove things - though its a good place to start. Chromosomes being the other obvious marker. And yes there will be the fleetingly rare edge cases which challenge this, but as a catch-all it's good enough.
So now we can move onto the debate. Can a woman have a penis? Legally no. Can a man have surgery to remove a penis and create a vagina? Can a man have hormone treatment to mute all of the male characteristics? Yes and yes - and that is where I sense the obvious line is drawn.
My friend Lauren will physically transition to be physically female. By which point I would hope that even the most strident activists wouldn't be demanding that a biologically transformed woman be denied entry to certain toilets etc. She is very different to what I think so many activists object to which is manly women whose transition starts and ends with a frock and pronouns.
On a point of order - does @Cyclefree and her fellow activists accept that this ruling does nothing for female safety? Women get dragged into toilets and changing rooms by men and then get assaulted, raped, murdered. Men already had access to womens spaces because the rapey murdery ones just barge in. And still will.
The threat to women was not trans women, it's men. I hope that the ruling allows us to move on from this minority sport and go back to basics which is raising young men to understand that their rights over women are zero.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crm3x27vw70o
*The website states that you may be able to get help paying the fee. £6. FFS
On gender, I think we will simply have to only allow recognition in whatever form - although not access to female sex spaces and the like - post some kind of surgery.
I’m increasingly worried that young people think they are trans but are actually just children. Above 18 is a different story but I accept I’m quite late on this.
Krishna Guha, at ISI Evercore, says it would be “difficult to overstate the consequences at this stressed moment of a [Supreme] court ruling that found that President Trump – who has just tweeted saying Powell’s termination cannot come soon enough – does have the authority to dismiss the heads of independent agencies and did not establish a clear carve-out for the Fed”.
Telegraph
Personally I am happy with the ruling as frankly it is a statement of the obvious but sometimes the obvious needs saying. I am happy too that my daughters, should they need it, will be able to benefit from the security of a women only space, free from the risk of a man gaining access by self-declaring as a woman and "wearing a frock and a wig" as Rochdale puts it in his colourful way. And female sport is secure.
At the same time there is clearly a gap in the law for people who have undergone gender reassignment surgery. I have no difficulty in accepting that they are the sex they have become, which it appears the law currently rejects. So once the dust has settled some further thought will be needed about how to address that, if there is a consensus for change.
Meh. Remember that my starter for 10 is to tell the shouty extremists on both sides of the debate to STFU. I don't think Cyclefree is one.
I think I understand the principle of the "trans women are men are a threat to women" argument, even if I disagree with parts of it. And I'm certainly not here to mansplain.
My interpretation of it is that for many women a line had been crossed. Lesbians who had to fight for their rights being pissed off that now a bloody man could say they are a woman and therefore a lesbian. Women who have had to fight for their rights to vote and for equality and basic rights such as financial independence seeing men encroaching. I get it.
My point is that having won this battle, I hope that we can refocus on the basic rights of women to be treated with the same basic respect and dignity as men. Which includes the right not to be assaulted and raped and murdered by men. Whilst I can understand why some women would feel threatened by some trans men in a changing room, removing said trans men does not make them safe.
The basic reality lost in the screeching row is this - if a man wants to attack a woman in a female space there is no need to faff around pretending to be trans. They just get on with it. The "we are threatened" argument seemed to ignore that they were threatened before and are threatened now...
The whole point of human society is that we limit our rights so as to give space to the rights of others. Arbitrating this is how law came into being.
As I pointed out to you the other day, if somebody like "my friend Lauren" used a single-sex female toilet, then the organizers of that toilet could be sued and under the new ruling the organizers would lose.
Secondly, land law as it stands is exactly the fruit of 1000 years of the law balancing competing 'rights' - the right to walk around in your own country as a free citizen in a free country, and the right to private possession. The details remain fairly controversial, though not at a red hot heat level.
There is some enforcement being attempted. But, rather like the driving test comedy, nothing really effective is being done.
Having legal definitions of "man" and "woman" should not be the basis for removing all rights and dignities of trans men and women. As I have said above, as someone who is LGBTQetc* I absolutely support the rights of my friend and my kid's friend. But rights need to have legal definitions to be hung from, and this lets us move on from the virtue signalling divisive drivvel about who can have a cock.
Can we now find a way to support women's rights AND trans rights? One should not need to be imposed on the other. They can coexist if we are all understanding and reasonable.
*and again, that's me being colourful. The endless letters seem to change depending who you ask. I actually think "queer" is a wonderful catch-all, repossessing a word used by my dad to (unknowingly) keep me in the closet and throwing in back in bigot faces
I found Farage’s move to the left especially on nationalising steel, praising trade unions interesting. The “re-industrialisation” message is something that worked very effectively for Trump and Johnson.
I fear for the job of one Ed Miliband who I think is probably going to be severely undermined. I just cannot see how the government don’t allow new oil and gas licenses now.
"The main finding of the case simulation study is that the verdicts of racially mixed juries did not discriminate against defendants based on the defendant’s race."
"Even though the defendant’s ethnicity did not have an impact on jury verdicts, the research found that in certain cases ethnicity did have a significant impact on the individual votes of some jurors who sat on these juries. Statistical analysis of the individual votes of all 319 jurors who took part in the case simulation showed that in certain cases BME jurors were significantly less likely to vote to convict a BME defendant than a White defendant.
"Same race leniency among BME jurors was only present when race was not an explicit element of the case (defendant charged with ABH only). When the same assault was prosecuted as Racially-aggravated ABH, BME jurors and White jurors had similar conviction rates for both the White and BME defendants."
"Evidence was also found that White jurors showed some same race leniency towards White defendants, but again this was only present in cases where race was not an explicit element of the case. In non-race salient cases, White jurors had very low conviction rates for the White defendant, despite consistently stating that they did not believe his evidence and felt he was dishonest."
"The crucial finding of the study was that these tendencies towards same race leniency by BME or White jurors did not have an impact on the verdicts of the [racially mixed] juries on which they sat"
"What remains to be answered is whether all-White juries, which decide cases in most Crown Courts, also do not discriminate against defendants based on race."
They’re going cheep.
Trans woman uses female toilet
Well-funded activist group sues
How would the case go?
"The organiser of this toilet allowed a MAN in"
How exactly does the complainant imagine that the venue police the toilet? Place a guard at the entrance? Only let in ones who "look like a woman"? Do some kind of check?
In the real world (as in not in America/Gilead) nobody is going to sue. And any moron who tries can be told to GFT.
This is my problem with the women's rights vs trans rights row. It's always about sodding toilets.
The Australian Navy did 30+ tow backs without drowning anybody. After that, they didn't have to do any more because the boats stopped. So the processes and techniques for doing it are well understood and tested.
The diffusion index for current general activity dropped 39 points to -26.4 in April, its lowest reading since April 2023 (see Chart 1). Nearly 39 percent of the firms reported decreases in general activity this month, while 13 percent reported increases; 41 percent reported no change. The index for new orders also fell sharply, from 8.7 in March to -34.2 this month, its lowest reading since April 2020. The current shipments index decreased 11 points to -9.1 this month.
The firms reported mostly steady employment overall, as the employment index fell 20 points to 0.2 in April. Most firms (84 percent) reported no change in employment, while small, nearly identical shares reported increases and decreases (6 percent). The average workweek index fell sharply, from 8.7 to -12.7.
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/regional-economic-analysis/mbos-2025-04
Can the UK seriously tow back the boats to France without an agreement of some kind?
And with that, fin.
Does the "human right" to roam - even here in Scotland - mean an absolute right? Can I wander across a golf course or a shooting range or through a factory or across the pitch at Hampden during the cup final or across the M9? And then sue because my human rights have been violated because I was stopped?
Not a gender critical woman, most trans people are killed by their partners, male partners.
Otherwise, I agree. We actually have quite cheap gas compared with our European neighbours, while electricity is expensive. Let's transfer the tax burden to gas and accelerate our transition to electricity.
And there are sex predators who pretend to be Trans which make the issue a complete mess..
I don't deny @Cyclefree 's right to joy at the ruling. My wife would certainly take issue with her embracing triumphalism, though.
We're facing a new security paradigm in Europe. A live threat from Russia and a growing one from America. Thanks to decades of cuts we have a navy which can barely defend our home waters never mind do anything else.
If tow backs are what we want our remaining naval assets to be doing we may as well just pack up now and let Russia do what it wants.
The other basic problem with tow backs is where you are towing them back to. As tow backs is the suggestion from the FU foreigners brigade we wouldn't be doing so in collaboration with France. So why couldn't the French navy just tow the boats the other way?
Will trans men be forced to use female toilets? Will females be upset by them as well?
You are going to be sorely disappointed. The activists are saying transmen are misguided lesbians, and that transwomen are 'men in frocks'. Some are denying the existence of trans people, even when people have been fully transitioned for decades. Some want to make it impossible to be trans to any degree.
It is also going to harm natural-born women who are 'different': ones who look masculine, or ones who choose to dress or look different. That's already been happening, but it is going to worsen.
I utterly agree with your last paragraph; and feel that many men find blaming 'others' for abuse allows them to think it's not people like themselves performing abuse. It's not their brother; their neighbour; their work colleague. Only the 'other' abuses.
Gone deer.
Cyclefree using the phrase “trans identified men” is GC phrasing through & through. It’s good to see her being open about it to be honest: she’s spent years being coy on here, dropping the wink here & there to let like minded people know her true views.
I have not said 'stop paying France' have I? I have said payments should be set up in a different way that is dependent on results. You take the estimated impact on the boats of the current grants under the 'deal'. You translate that into a price per boat destroyed, smuggler arrested etc., and you agree to pay that per evidence of each outcome - you could agree to pay more than the 'going rate' as an incentive. Payment on delivery.
The previous Government already detained asylum seekers in a barge. It was perfectly servicable and comfortable. The current Government ended that - that is performative. As for other facilities, yes nimbys and Tory constituency MPs were against them - since when is that an objection for you?
Rwanda could easily have been used as a processing centre. The Government could have done so - it would have been sufficiently different from the Tories' policy 'more humane, more just' to be do-able politically. Instead they pathetically scrapped the whole scheme to make an infantile party political point, and then went bizarrely to 'learn from Claudia Meloni' on overseas processing.
Nobody EVER decried the concept of going after people smugglers, what a bizarre lie. 'Smash the gangs' was criticised as the sole strategy for solving illegal migration, and that criticism has proven valid in the event. However, even with it being the sole strategy, the police are quite clearly doing a shit job, which is why they got shown up by the BBC.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6pyyqep831o
I suspect Yvette Cooper is 'not getting involved in operational matters', and if she doesn't have the levers to give the police a rocket over this, she needs to get them.
Towbacks and overseas processing worked in Australia. And they are far more dangerous there. I don't see what objection France could have - they were quite clearly OK with them being in French waters, as they allowed them without hindrance. So yes, they would go back to France. And if boats don't get through, no more boats come.