Links - 1st February 2025 (2 - Trans Mania)

Mario Nawfal on X - "🚨🇺🇸SCOTUS JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: "BANNING SEX CHANGES FOR KIDS IS THE SAME AS BANNING INTERRACIAL MARRIAGES""
Mario Nawfal on X - "A Supreme Court justice comparing not allowing minors to have sex changes to racial discrimination seems off… Dr. @GadSaad would this be considered a mind virus problem or a case of suicidal empathy?"
Gad Saad on X - "I'm unsure why she is weighing in on this issue given that she did not have the "expertise" to define what a woman is. She should sit this one out."

Thread by @Miriam_Grossman on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I’m astonished at the profound ignorance on display at the SCOTUS today. Sotomajor and Jackson- you think giving T to a boy is the same as giving it to a girl? You believe a girl can go through “typical male puberty”? I am dumbfounded. Are there no intelligence standards that must be met for your positions? Male and female are permanently established at conception, you forgot? Kids are not sex neutral beings who can be transformed into M or F with shots and implants. And strangio — “blockers do not harm”, are you kidding me? The reason Sweden rejected them is because “Leo” developed spinal fractures from blocker-induced osteoporosis. Don’t you know ANYTHING?"

Michael Shermer on X - ""Another interesting (and telling) component here is the number of biologists who are silent on the topic." The answer @SkepticJonGuy  is a "common knowledge" problem: Biologists know sex is binary, and they know others know it. If they say it, however, they'll be accused of transphobia They can't say sex is not binary because they'd be lying, and they would know others know they're lying. They can't even say "no comment" because that would signal they know the only 2 options are truth and lies. Therefore it is rational to stay silent."
Of course, there will still be those sympathetic or wilfully blind to trans mania who claim that Steven Novella is a neurologist, not a biologist (and his physiology qualifications don't count), so it doesn't mean anything that he refuses to acknowledge the reality of biological sex

Frank on X - "I once spoke with a PhD biologist who insisted that sex is a "multivariate bimodal spectrum", almost impossible to define or even diagnose yet he never got back to me when questioned why he was able to separate his lab mice into males and females with 100% accuracy."
We will be told that because the biologist is not identified, this anecdote is not reliable, and no biologists believe sex is non-binary

Meme - Sall Grover @salltweets: "Literally no human being has ever changed sex. They’re 100% male."
"Are trans women 'biologically male'? The answer is complicated"
Naturally, the original article is a load of nonsense but a MTF

Children in Need ex-chair: I was thrown under bus on transgender charity funding - "The former chair of BBC Children in Need has claimed she was “thrown under the bus” for being a “whistleblower” on grants given to a transgender youth charity.  Rosie Millard stepped down from her role in November, saying she did not feel she had the full support of her board after she demanded Children in Need stopped funding LGBT Youth Scotland amid her fears it was “harming children”.  The charity, which said it engages in “life-changing work supporting LGBTQ+ young people in Scotland”, was given just under half a million in funding by Children in Need across 14 years. But Ms Millard, in an interview with Times Radio, said she had discovered the charity had “a lot of problems which I felt would bring Children in Need into reputational damage”.  The charity acknowledged in a statement on its website that it has had “challenges”, including previous chief executive James Rennie being convicted in 2009 as a ringleader of Scotland’s biggest paedophile network.  It also noted that a contributor to a coming-out guide published by the charity in 2009 was convicted of crimes against children in 2024. The charity said it condemns “any actions which harm children and young people”.  Its chief executive has accused Ms Millard of having “anti-inclusivity motives” and pointing to “historic allegations against us in attempts to destroy our reputation”. While Children in Need did cancel funding to the charity, Ms Millard said she felt she could not stay on as she did not have the support of her board... On the board not supporting her, Ms Millard said she felt “such is the pressure to appear inclusive, that people bend over backwards to show that they are not prejudiced” regarding sexuality and gender. Ms Millard said she had found the charity to be working in primary schools with a charter which she said “brought in notions of gender fluidity”.  She also questioned the charity’s approach on puberty blockers and chest binders. She said: “I felt this charity was harming children, and Children in Need – the mission for Children in Need – is to support and help children, help them be the best they can be and not harm them.  “If that is being a ‘terf’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) then I’m proud to be one.”... Asked if she felt “hounded out” of her role, she said: “I think my position was made untenable. And I think that if you are the whistleblower, then sometimes you’re going to get thrown under the bus.”  Asked if that is what had happened to her, Ms Millard replied: “Yep.”"

Transgender man found to be pregnant during sex change - "  “Having discovered the pregnancy, the first thing to do is to suspend [hormone] therapy immediately,” Dr. Giulia Senofonte, an endocrinologist, told La Repubblica, the news outlet that first reported it.  The expert on gender therapy warned that the fetus could be at risk. “If the halting of the therapy is not immediate, there could be consequences, especially in the first trimester of pregnancy, which is an important time for the development of the baby’s organs,” Senofonte said. “It’s difficult to talk about it in abstract terms, but it all depends on the timing of the suspension of the dosages of testosterone that the person is taking,” she added. High levels of male and female hormones in the parent’s body carry cardiological risk because of possible blood pressure and coagulation problems, Senofonte said, according to the Times of London.  “Hormone therapy blocks the menstrual cycle but it is not a contraceptive. The person can continue to ovulate and, consequently, runs the risk of pregnancy,” she said.  “People dealing with transition usually recommend contraceptive pills that can be used during hormone therapy,” the expert added.  Marco, who is expected to go through with the pregnancy, will be the child’s biological mom but will be registered legally as the dad, according to La Repubblica."

Meme - "r/asktransgender
[NSFW] Why do I feel like such a hypocrite?!
God why. As a trans lesbian woman pre-op, I definitely know how it hurts when someone tells me I'm not a real woman, especially when having sex. I've had ladies go down on me and just telling me they can't do it with me anymore just because it's too male down there. Recently I had my first sexual encounter with another trans lesbian, and I began having the same thoughts. Especially when we were having intercourse, I kept thinking that I'm actually having sex with a man. I honestly feel like the biggest hypocrite in the world right now. And I just want to hide or go hurt myself again. I'm confused and just want to die."

Meme - "I WON'T USE SOMEONE'S PRONOUNS FOR THE SAME REASON I WON'T TALK TO A SCHIZOPHRENIC'S IMAGINARY FRIENDS."

Meme - "A 20-year-old UCLA student has sued two California doctors, saying they inappropriately rushed her "down a life-altering and irreversibly damaging" gender transition beginning at age 12 that she regrets."
Brent Black: ""as a leftist, my healthcare is completely between me, and unethical activist doctors - Pro choice, pro trans affirmative care Karen"

UCLA student sues California doctors, says she was 'fast-tracked' into transgender surgery - "A UCLA student is suing multiple California health care providers and hospitals for medical negligence, alleging she was wrongly diagnosed with gender dysphoria and then “fast-tracked onto the conveyor belt of irreversibly damaging” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery, according to her lawsuit.  Kaya Clementine Breen, 20, said she experienced sexual abuse as a young child, and by the time she was 11, she “began struggling with the thought of developing into a woman and began to believe that life would be easier if she were a boy,” according to her suit filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court. When she expressed this to her then-school counselor, the counselor told her “that she was transgender and called her parents to tell them the same.” Breen, who was also suffering from anxiety, depression and undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the lawsuit, was then taken by her parents to the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where she said she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria — the distress one can experience when their gender identity and birth sex are in conflict — and began to receive transition-related care at 12 years old. “This case is about a team of purported health care providers who collectively decided that a vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental health struggles and suffering from multiple instances of sexual abuse should be prescribed a series of life-altering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, ultimately, receive a double mastectomy at the age of 14,” Breen’s lawsuit states.  Breen began receiving puberty-suppressing medication at 12, was prescribed cross-sex hormones from 13 to 19 and underwent a double mastectomy at 14, according to court documents, which stated that her “her mental health progressively declined” following these treatments.  In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Breen said, “In retrospect, I wish that somebody had suggested real, genuine therapy first, instead of gender-specific therapy, because really the only therapy that I received until much later was specifically focused on gender dysphoria, and didn’t connect my gender dysphoria to anything else.” Breen said she began to question her decision to transition after she started dialectical behavior therapy, a type of talk therapy that seeks to help those struggling with intense emotions, earlier this year... The defendants in Breen’s lawsuit include Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, an adolescent medicine physician specializing in gender-affirming care; Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; Dr. Scott Mosser, a plastic surgeon specializing in gender-affirming surgery; the Gender Confirmation Center of San Francisco; UCSF Health Community Hospitals; and psychotherapist Susan P. Landon... Breen said she doesn’t believe the individual health providers named in her lawsuit “intentionally acted in poor faith,” but she alleged they were dismissive of her pre-existing mental health issues.  When asked what she hopes to get from this lawsuit, Breen said she wants “some semblance of justice or change.” While she is seeking “financial reimbursement for the amount that this has cost me and my family,” she said, she most of all wants to “help dismantle the rumor that no one is ever fast-tracked into gender treatments.”"
Weird. We're told this never happens and it's super hard to get trans "care" and there's always gatekeeping

Detransitioner sues Planned Parenthood, other doctors over hormone therapy, breast removal - "Christina Hineman was in high school when she began to question her gender identity, according to a press release from Independent Women’s Forum. The experience led Hineman to identify as a transgender man, take prescription testosterone and undergo a double mastectomy.  Hineman, now 20, has since detransitioned and is suing the providers involved in the transition. The complaint alleges Hineman “had been betrayed by the lack of care and concern Defendants showed her in facilitating life-altering medical decisions.” “The scars across her chest and the irreversible changes to her body from prolonged usage of testosterone are constant reminders that she needed an unbiased medical expert willing to evaluate her properly and provide the care she needed,” it reads.  The suit charges the doctors involved with malpractice and lack of informed consent. It also holds the employers of the doctors responsible including Planned Parenthood, Rockmore Plastic Surgery and Astor Services."

Meme - "Hey you terf bigot. Here's my middle transbian finger to you, asshole. I'm a real woman whether you like it or not. And I just took a fat shit in the women's bathroom, so cry all you want bigot. We're coming for you"

Former trans charity boss to defy ban on puberty blockers - "An organisation led by the former chief executive of the transgender support charity Mermaids has vowed to keep on helping children get access to puberty blockers, despite a permanent UK ban.  Anne Trans Healthcare, co-founded by the former Mermaids leader Susie Green, hit out at Labour after it was announced that the government would keep a ban on the drugs for under-18s.  Wes Streeting, the health secretary, told MPs last week that he was making the temporary ban, introduced in May, indefinite across the UK. He said the way puberty blockers had been used was a “scandal”. The ban was backed by Baroness Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, whose report this year concluded that the field of gender medicine was “built on shaky foundations”... Green, 56, was dismissed as Mermaids’ chief executive in 2022 over a loss of trust in her leadership, a Charity Commission report into the organisation revealed.  The following year she set up Anne Trans Healthcare, which offers access to puberty blockers for under-18s and boasts of having secured a “legal route” to get them to Britons. Anne, of which Green is a director, says on its website that patients can get them prescribed from doctors outside the UK and sent to an “EU destination” for pick-up... The organisation was founded last year by Green and the entrepreneur Lizzie Jordan, a HIV advocate who also set up the LGBT youth support organisation Think2Speak. It is named after Jordan’s aunt and, on its website, it says it offers “evidence-based” and “gender-affirming” care for transgender people of all ages... Cass, who produced a report this year on the treatment of children with gender dysphoria, said a lot of “misinformation” was being spread, including a claim that denying access to puberty blockers could lead to suicides, when evidence has suggested that the drugs do not improve mental health.  Cass said: “What is worrying is when people say that if children don’t get these drugs, they will die, because clearly that’s not true.”"
Helen Joyce on X - "What is _wrong_ with this woman that she is _so_ determined to continue providing vulnerable kids with a drug treatment that is so dangerous, and for which there is no evidence whatsoever of benefit? Share token"
J.K. Rowling on X - "Green is one of those who'll go down with the Trans Titanic, taking as many kids as she's allowed to take with her. This woman will never stop voluntarily. To do so would mean admitting doubts about what she did to her own son."
Trust the Experts - unless they threaten the left wing agenda

Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ✡️⚢ ❌❌ on X - "If someone punched a 70 year old trans-identifying male in the face at a rally hard enough to fracture his skull, every major news outlet would spend weeks on the story. When a trans person fractured a 70 year old woman’s skull with his fists at #LetWomenSpeakAuckland, none of them made a sound.  Trans people are the new sacred caste."
Billy Bragg on X - "The man who did that doesn't identify as trans."
Woman 70, punched in the head 25/3/23 Auckland - "Most of you have seen the footage of the vicious attack on the 70 year old woman, Emily Steel*, at the Let Women Speak (attempted) rally in Auckland NZ on the 25 March 2023. Emily sustained serious injuries from this attack, her life has been fractured and it will take her a long time to heal emotionally and physically. I can assure you that she is doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. Rex Landy collected initial donations via her substack (buy me a coffee), on behalf of Emily to help get her over the first few days and to have a support person. This fund will help towards Emily's recovery, security and to continue advocating for children. #NeverSurrender #WomenWillSpeak"
Violence against women is good when it helps the left wing agenda

Charlie Kirk on X - "If you're 18 and think you're the opposite sex, you have a mental illness. If you're 8 and think you're the opposite sex, your mother has a mental illness."

CANADA: Metro Vancouver Transit Police Say They "Don't Know" Whether Sexual Assault Suspect Is Male Or Female Despite Having Semen Evidence - "On February 8, the Transit Police issued a press release pleading for help to identify the suspect. While photos and videos showed what appeared to be a male with long hair, some basic information on the suspect was curiously omitted from the release. No pronouns were used, and no information on the suspect’s sex was included... According to their website, The Metro Vancouver Transit Police is “the only dedicated police service in Canada focused on reducing crime and disorderly behavior in and around the public transportation system.” They also describe one of their four operational priorities as “reducing sexual offences.” In 2018, the police force launched an “Anti Sex Offence Campaign,” which consisted of a poster campaign and a number for victims or witnesses to text or call the transit police."
Weird. We're told that sex and gender are different and only ignorant people don't know that

Courage Is A Habit on X - "You all want to know how badly these people want to trans your children?  Today, while the country is watching this landmark Supreme Court case, these 7 radical members will vote on Dec 5 (tomorrow) to install a clinic in schools that can offer transgender treatments and all forms of "therapy" with affirm-only therapist, all without parental consent.  Exactly one month after the Presidential election where the country rose up against the transgender cult, school boards like this one are tripling down.   You do not have to live in Maine to help us stop them. Let's bring the eyes of the country on them. We made it easy for you: http://courageisahabit.org/#msad11"

Andy Ngo 🏳️‍🌈 on X - "The Biden-Harris administration joined the ACLU in a radical lawsuit to argue before the Supreme Court that it is a right to medically transition minors. If they win, it could also fundamentally transform understanding of anti-discrimination laws that protect women and girls across the U.S.  Can anti-Trump TERFS explain why you support Democrats?"

LGBT Courage Coalition on X - "Holy cow. Strangio is making the SEX BASED discrimination claim between males and females who seek to be males."
HeterodorxPodcast🍂🧑‍🦳 on X - "Today Chase Strangio is learning something really important. By avoiding her critics for years and years, the first time she’s had her ridiculous arguments tested is at the most critical juncture of her career. This is what comes from shutting down discourse."
Wesley Yang on X - "There are very few venues where you have to answer cogently, cannot shut down debate, and will be penalized if you rely on fallacies, bullying, emotional blackmail, slander, and veiled threats to get your way. Trans activism relied on this fact for decades."

Meghan McCain on X - "This right here is why the left has lost the culture war. Saying a 2 year old (!!!) should be castrated is nothing short of pure evil out of a science fiction book.   Every sentient normal American knows this and is horrified by it."

May Mailman on X - "Alito asks whether transgenderism is "immutable" meaning you can't change it? ACLU says it's biologically driven, trying to dodge. Alito says, what about "gender fluid"? ACLU admits that exist.   Immutability is key to being a protected legal class."

Andy Ngo 🏳️‍🌈 on X - "At the Supreme Court hearing on whether it is illegal to ban the medical transition of minors, liberal Justice Sotomayor interrupts the TN lawyer when he explains the health dangers. She says there are always risks to medicine, like taking aspirin."

Leor Sapir on X - "Wow.   Justice Alito: the Cass Report finds of no evidence that gender Rx prevents suicide.   Strangio: "completed suicide is thankfully and admittedly rare," the studies apply to suicidal ideation/behavior.   Has the @ACLU  just abandoned the "dead daughter/live son" narrative?"
James Lindsay, anti-Communist on X - "The Left doesn't care about people being bullied into suicidal ideation. Ask anyone they've struggled or cancelled."

Meme - Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ✡️⚢ ❌❌ @sappholives83: "This man feels “alienated” in his women’s support group, so he wants to force the actual women to restrict all discussion of their “afab body issues” to one day a week.  First they invade, then they demand to be in control. This is narcissism, and it’s gone mad with power."
"I need help coping with feeling alienated in womens groups
I'm apart of a womens support group at my college but i'm the only transgirl there. When the topic of discussion is something like misogyny I can relate obviously. But when the other girls talk about more... biological issues I feel uncomfortable and kinda sad. I tried contributing to the conversation once when one of the other girls was complaining of back pain from her breasts and how she wanted a breast reduction but didnt know if her insurance would cover it. I made a joke saying at least you have breasts haha!" And she kinda just stared at me and looked annoyed. The other girls make jokes about each others bodies all the time like joking about how all their cycles are gonna sync up (and i felt alienated there again) but when i try to make a joke everyone kinda just goes quiet. I know that we arent 100% the same i get that but i still feel miserable when they talk about afab problems. Is there a way i could tastefully bring this up to the group? I dont want them to not be able to talk about those issues but maybe I can ask them to set one specific day of the week (we meet 3 sometimes 4 times a week) to talk about afab body issues? I dont want to seem rude and be stepping on their toes i just wanna feel like i really fit in."

Meme - "MEN: CHECK OUT MY NEW CAR
WOMEN: CHECK OUT MY NEW PURSE.
HOLLYWOOD STARS: CHECK OUT MY NEW TRANS KID."

Meme - J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling: "Never forget: gender identity isn't about sex stereotypes, but playing around with your hair proves you're not a man."
Brianna Wu @BriannaWu: "I know that there's an angry crowd that will never believe trans women are an (admittedly weird) variation of woman. But for people in the middle, here's 25 minutes of @dollcastshow just talking about doing our hair. Can anyone honestly say we would make sense living as men?"

Meme - "Tell me the truth for once!"
"Being anti-third gender is a pro-trans stance. Actual trans people (who aren't faking for tiktok clout) want to integrate into society and just want to be treated like a normal male or female."

Libs of TikTok on X - "Meet Katherine Rigby, a California judge who was appointed by Newsom. She ordered that Tremaine Carroll, a man pretending to be a woman must be referred to with she/her pronouns. Carroll was incarcerated in a women’s prison where he r*ped two women and impregnated a third."

Scarlett Johnson on X - "🚨BREAKING: A boy is now allowed to change in the girls' locker room at Westosha Central High School in Wisconsin.
-He stares at the young girls while they change
-He exposes his p-nis and rubs himself with lotion
-He claims to the girls that the lotion is to “prevent chafing”"

MaryCate Delvey on X - "WOW!! We have reached PART 40 of LISTEN TO TRANS PEOPLE!! “They just want to pee” — you sure about that?"
Items from this post, quoting trans people, follow

Meme - Arrested for internet crimes @C...: "Jerking off in the women's room to own the TERFs
Someone's threatening to call the cops on me for this post lol"

Meme - Liv @livulose: "Invading female spaces to be a sexual degenerate is such a rush. Loudly fapping and moaning and cumming all over the place knowing full well of they complain you can just call them transphobic
Wanna stalk a cutie and rape them in an alley and properly live up to the trans rapist accusation~
The correct response to finding out about a trans rapist and their crimes is to be horny"

Meme - @wishbone 🐭 @wishbone48: "And power The euphoria of “there’s not a damn thing those women can do about it”"
The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦 @Rob_ThaBuilder: "That is 100% it.  They talk about "passing", These men don't WANT to pass. The thrill is that the women KNOW they're men and there's not a damn thing they can do about it."
@wishbone 🐭 @wishbone48: "Listening to @marycatedelvey  reading posts is utterly enlightening"

Meme - Benjamin Ryan @benryanwriter: "In response to a WaPo article in which an Italian child travels to Spain to obtain puberty blockers and does so on the first appointment following a single online consultation, journalist Evan Urquhart claims there “still hasn’t been a single reported example of a minor getting blockers or hormones without a lengthy assessment.”   Evan is ignoring Jesse Singal’s Economist article from earlier this month about Clementine Breen getting blockers after a single appointment with Johanna Olson-Kennedy.   And he is forgetting my reporting that since 2018, it has been Boston Children’s policy to provide only a single two-hour assessment appointment with a psychologist to determine whether a minor should get blockers or hormones."
Evan Urquhart @evanurquhart.bsk...: "This is a beautiful, deeply reported piece en family forced to travel to Spain to pause puberty for their trans daughter."
Evan Urquhart @evanurquhart.bsky.social: "After years of attempts at sensationalizing rare stories of detransition, there still hasn't been a reported example of a minor getting blockers or hormones without a lengthy assessment and their parents going through the full informed consent process."

Ubisoft Astroturfing / Ubisoft Inclusive Exclusive Mentorship Program / How to Spot a Failed Studio / Concord

"Ubisoft uses Babel Media to help their online image."
"Online marketing can take a variety of forms, depending on the type of product being promoted. As multilingual experts, we employ a team of native 'guerrillas' to infiltrate forums and message boards in selected territories. Specific site administrators can also be contacted to run competitions in return for exclusive and inside information on a product."
"Not only Ubisoft. BG3 has been shilled by them, they got BTFO'd by white men posting their hands after they kept spamming a "only shitskins dislike bg3" line. They now moved on to shill Hades2 and they literally confirmed they are the same exact jeets by posting the hand that BTFO'd them in BG3 half a year ago."

"r/KotakuInAction
Ubisoft inclusive mentorship program that excludes men (link/source in the post section)"

"MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

With more people playing video games than ever before, it is important for us to help build an inclusive entertainment industry that reflects the diversity of our players. With this mentorship, we have an exciting opportunity to support talents from different backgrounds, bringing fresh perspectives and new ideas.

The selected candidates will create a project based on a predetermined theme and will be mentored by a Ubisoft expert over a fixed period, from November 2024 to March 2025 (specific timelines may vary by location). During this time, they will receive feedback to help build their project.

ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA

To be eligible you must :

. Identify as a woman or a non-binary individual
. Be 18 years old or older
. Currently attend or have graduated in or after Spring 2023
. Have less than 2 years of professional experience in Game Design or Programming in video games
. Be legally entitled to work in the country where you are applying
. Apply to only one location
. Submit an individual entry - team entries will not be considered"

Grummz @Grummz: "These comparisons always come up. You can point out that the "all women" photos are a selected subset. That's not the issue. The issue is that studios who are woke go out of their way to publish these "look at our women!" photos in order to virtue signal. That's the true concern here. If a studio is doing these types of photos, it's usually because its a DEI move."
Ghost of Tsushima: *all men*
Ghost of Yotei: *all women including one transwoman [?]*

Doomer Wojak Sony: "Maybe spending 8 years to develop an online only FPS featuring plus-size troon space pirates was a bad business decision"

Links - 1st February 2025 (1 [including Kemi Badenoch & Paul Krugman Failed Predictions])

Finally, a leader who’s willing to fight the culture war - "Imagine if, a few years ago, you had told the wet leftists of the British establishment that one day there’d be a black woman in charge of a major political party and that they would freak out about it. That instead of celebrating this final breakthrough for race relations, these self-styled progressives would be bitterly murmuring into their muesli that ‘She’s a bit abrasive’ and ‘God help us now’. They’d have refused to believe you. Yet here we are. Kemi Badenoch has won the Conservative Party leadership contest and becomes the first black person ever to lead a major party in Britain. And the left ain’t happy...   She has more than proved her mettle in the battle of ideas. She knows what a woman is, which instantly makes her more deserving of a vote than Keir Starmer, who famously turns into a gibbering wreck whenever he’s asked basic questions about biology. Badenoch hasn’t so much ‘waded in’ to the ‘trans row’, as the media like to describe it, as she has marched in, sword of truth raised. She insists we must ‘protect women’s spaces’ from the presence of men. Whether it’s ‘rapists being housed in women’s prisons’ or ‘men playing in women’s sports’, it’s just not on, she says. And we must be free to say so without the ‘fear of being accused of transphobia’. Three cheers for that.   She has stood up for the right of young gay folk to discover their sexuality without being pumped with puberty-blocking drugs or mauled by surgery to ‘correct’ their ‘wrong’ bodies. The sinister medical meddling with gay kids’ bodies is a species of conversion therapy, she says, essentially aimed at ‘making them straight’. She’s right. And her views were lately echoed by JD Vance, who said ‘trans-affirming healthcare’ is ‘pharmaceutical’ conversion therapy. Badenoch has even met with the LGB Alliance, the brilliant gay-rights group ruthlessly maligned by the lost souls of the woke as a ‘hate group’. She’s a better friend of homosexuals than anyone on the Labour benches.   She has challenged the fashionable view of Britain as ‘institutionally racist’. Actually, she says, this is ‘the best country in the world to be black’. Her praise of this plucky nation that ‘sees people, not labels’ infuriates the mostly white wet-wipes of the opinion-forming classes who get off on flagellating both themselves and the kingdom for all the racial crimes of history. To these people, there’s nothing worse – really, nothing – than the sight of a black lady saying ‘It’s good to be black in Britain’. It shatters their ideologies of self-loathing from which they derive their cultural power and media clout. A black woman nipping at the heels of the fashionable shame of white influencers? It just won’t do. She’s an enemy of cultural relativism. ‘Not all cultures are equally valid’, she recently said, to the noisy chagrin of the woke. They know she’s right – these people would never move to Kabul or let their daughters suffer the FGM that poor girls in Africa are forced to endure – but they hate that she says it. For in doing so, she punctures their cult of post-judgementalism, their moral cowardice that they doll up as a ‘celebration of diversity’.   She’s even injected moral clarity into the tortured and frankly terrifying Israel-Hamas debate. ‘I stand with Israel’, she says. ‘We cannot stand with Hezbollah, we cannot stand with Hamas.’ Then her killer line: ‘We know who the bad guys are.’ At a time when so many of our young are beating the streets to damn Israel as evil and to praise Hamas as ‘the resistance’, it couldn’t be more important to have a party leader who is able to slice so finely through such abject moral idiocy and to state out loud that the Jewish nation has the right to defend itself against the armies of Jew haters that surround it. ‘Bad guys’ – how rare, how refreshing, to hear that phrase.   She has slammed cancel culture – we ‘need more bravery and less cancel culture’, she says. She fiercely rebuked the Californian tech bosses who exercise a moral stranglehold over the modern public square. It’s a very serious problem when tech giants ‘become so big [that] they effectively become more powerful than government in regulating what people say’, she says. And she defends Brexit, the right of the 17.4million souls who voted to leave the EU to have their wishes acted on by the political class. This has earned her the animus of those insufferable craft-beer snobs at the New European who say she ‘will be bad in all sorts of ways’. Wear it as a badge of pride, Kemi – if the New European doesn’t hate you, you’re doing it wrong. So here we have a leader who knows that women don’t have dicks, who thinks the West is good rather than rotten, who appreciates the importance of the liberty to utter, who supports the right of the Jewish State to fight back against the Jew-killing machines of Hamas and Hezbollah, and who thinks gay kids shouldn’t be drugged or chopped up. We’re meant to think this is a ‘far right’ agenda?... This is why the left is pissed off. This is why they cannot celebrate the remarkable ascendancy of this 44-year-old woman of colour to the top of Britain’s oldest political party. This is why the painfully woke Guardian wrings its hands over the ‘worrying rise’ of ‘divisive [politicians] like Kemi Badenoch’ and frets that she sometimes seems ‘openly abrasive’. (I guess the old woke rule about not tone-policing black women has been retired.)"

Wanjiru Njoya on X - "Telegraph explaining why Kemi Badenoch was the right choice for the Tories: she's black, she's a woman, and she's an immigrant. This is how Tories fight culture wars: by out-woking the woke."

Zarah Sultana MP on X - "Kemi Badenoch is one of the most nasty & divisive figures in British politics. From downplaying racism to Islamophobic remarks like "not all cultures are equally valid" & questioning why Sadiq Khan gets a “free pass” for being Muslim, her election marks a shift to the far-right."
Konstantin Kisin on X - "If saying "not all cultures are the same" is Islamophobic, that must mean Islamic culture is not the same as ours. So you agree with Kemi?"
Bart Drenth on X - "The intersectional mind masterfully holds two opposing beliefs at once: recognizing cultural differences is discriminatory and must be punished, while not embracing diverse ways of knowing and doing deserves the same fate"
Coddled affluent professional on X - ""not all cultures are equally valid" The reason voicing this sentiment must be so harshly punished is that it is so self evidently true."

Kehinde Andrews on X - "Congratulations to @KemiBadenoch 'the shining ebony example that the #PsychosisOfWhiteness is not reserved for those with white skin'. I reeeeeeaaalllly hate to say I told you so on this one 🤦🏾‍♂️"
Damo on X - "This is the sort of take you'd expect from someone who calls black people he doesn't like "coons", "coconuts" and "house negros". What should be less expected is that this abject racist holds a position at a major university and is treated as a serious academic by the media."

Thread by @WanjiruNjoya on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The shortest ever tenure as Harvard President was a black woman, demoted for plagiarism.  A black woman went down in history as the shortest ever tenure running John Lewis, axed for nearly bankrupting it.  A black man has the honor of the shortest stint as Chancellor of the UK.   That's not counting other less high profile epic failures, like Ibram Kendi who was awarded $40 million in research funding and produced no research.  Black people are so gullible. They're offered high profile positions to showcase wokery and they just say YES!  Farcical. Everyone is telling Kemi she's just like Mrs Thatcher.  I guess she believes them.  Like many wise men have said - Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams - you should be proud of who you are. You don't have to pretend to be like Mrs Thatcher when you're not. Just say no. The point is not the length of their tenures, but the fact that they have gone down in history for all the wrong reasons.  Good people over-promoted beyond their abilities, only for them to crash in full sight of the whole world.  That's the tragedy."
On Kemi Badenoch

Nels Abbey on X - "Warning: Seven Rules for Surviving A Kemi Badenoch Victory
Today the most prominent member of white supremacy's Black collaborator class (in Britain) is likely to be made leader of the Conservative Party. Here are some handy tips for surviving the immediate surge of Badenochism (i.e. white supremacy in Blackface):
1. Don’t allow yourself to be gaslit. Of course, a victory for Badenoch is an obvious, unprecedented and once inconceivable victory for racism. Yet for legitimacy and national blush-saving purposes, it will be portrayed as anything but. Hence the Black & Brown voices invited to speak about a Badenoch victory in the media will likely be carefully selected. Expect a lot of Sunder Katwala and Trevor Phillips types, but not much from anyone else. Certainly not knowledgeable objectors.
2. Don't feed the trolls: avoid the inevitable avalanche of “whatever your politics” rhetoric. E.g. “Whatever your politics, you must acknowledge how great and progressive the Conservative Party is now that a Blackface of white supremacy has broken the glass ceiling for all Black people…” and “Whatever your politics, Black children finally have a great role model to look up to”.
3. Don’t get arrested Pt. I: As that free speech championing entity known as the British state would say: be careful what you post. The police scour this app for "offensive" material and they take immense glee in weaponising laws designed to protect ethnic minorities against ethnic minorities.
4. Don’t get arrested Pt. II: The police don't do nuance, and they conveniently refuse to understand Black & Brown intra-communal language or forms of critique, satire or compliment (e.g. coconut, Uncle Tom, Aunt Kemi, house negro, choc ice, etc).
5. Don’t get arrested Pt. III: In pursuit of "protecting" the feelings and political positions of ethnic minority politicians (with far-right sensibilities), the police and CPS will do everything conceivably possible to legally and psychologically destroy you.
6. Don’t get arrested Pt. IV: Look up The Emoji Trial and The Coconut Trial for more information on how quickly proprietary Black & Brown intellectual tradition, thought or language can land you in a British police cell.
7. Remember White supremacy’s silver linings: they always discard their tools. Always. Yes, this will be a painful and shameful period. Our various politics and very standing in Britain and as British people will be seriously compromised by a Badenoch victory. Yet rest assured: painful as it may be for Black & Brown people – history teaches us that Badenochism will end even worse for Kemi Badenoch.
"Amen" said the church.  Good luck!"

Labour MP shares post saying Kemi Badenoch represents ‘white supremacy in blackface’ - "Dawn Butler appeared to endorse comments that also referred to Mrs Badenoch’s election as a “victory for racism”... Mrs Badenoch is the fourth female Tory leader after Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss. Labour has never had a female leader, and all of its leaders to date have been white. James Cleverly, who was one of Mrs Badenoch’s Tory leadership rivals, said Labour “need to sort themselves out”, calling Sir Keir’s party “male, pale and stale”.  Ben Obese-Jecty, the Conservative MP for Huntingdon, urged Sir Keir to remove the Labour whip from Ms Butler.  “It never takes much for Labour’s mask to slip. Dawn Butler is not alone on the Government benches in holding this view of Kemi,” he said. “This will be a test to see whether Keir Starmer removes the whip or effectively condones Butler’s abhorrent approval of this smear.” Last year, Mrs Badenoch said she had told her children that Britain is “the best country in the world to be black”. In an interview with The Telegraph, she said: “Being an ethnic minority, irrespective of what country you’re in, is challenging and that is just human nature.  “Even in countries where everybody is black, when you have ethnic minorities within them as I saw within Nigeria they often face very significant discrimination, more so than the sort of discrimination which I have seen myself in the UK.”"
Left wingers keep going on the importance of "representation" and "anti-racism", but really it's just a way to push through the left wing agenda. They don't really love "minorities" and racism is good when you're scolding "minorities" who dare step off the left wing plantation. Hate speech laws are only good when they push the left wing agenda
What a surprise this is from Butler, so soon after her recent scandal

Wanjiru Njoya on X - "Lefties like to peddle the same lines. Seems they've been told to say "nasty and divisive""

Paul Krugman: Trump will bring global recession (2016)
Nobel Prize Winner Explains How Trump Could Cause 'Economic Chaos' - Newsweek (2024)
The boy who cried wolf is credible when it pushes the left wing agenda

Paul Krugman: Always Wrong, Never in Doubt (2019) - "(My favorite Trump-era Krugmanism, though, is when the esteemed economist explains away his bad predictions by claiming that the economy’s successes are really just driven by instances of his own political preferences playing out — “Impeaching Trump Is Good for the Economy,” “The Economics of Donald J. Keynes,” and so on.) At some point, of course, doomsayers such as Krugman are going to be right. In the past 60 years the United States has been hit with recessions in 1960–61, 1969–70, 1973–75, 1980, 1981–82, 1990–91, 2001, and 2007–09. History says we’re probably due for another one soon. When it hits, Krugman will blame tax cuts, unfettered capitalist greed, a dearth of regulations — and maybe climate change, or whatever hobbyhorse he’s riding at the time. MSNBC hosts will hail him as a seer.  Much like most economists, I have no clue what the future holds. But I do know that Barack Obama, who oversaw the slowest recovery in American history, was constantly being given credit for averting disaster by adopting smart policies (read: spending). Years after the bailouts — which is to say years of D.C. gridlock in which the former president, by his own admission, couldn’t enact any of his preferred economic policies — Democrats were still claiming that short-term first-year spending fixes were the impetus for growth. There’s a more rational explanation: Washington stopped helping.  Voters vastly overestimate the role that presidents play in economic growth, to be sure. But Trump-era job creation was a far tougher task, since he was operating with less room for job growth than his predecessor. And considering the (self-inflicted) trade wars, political turmoil, and foreign-policy concerns that have dominated much of his first term, conventional wisdom tells us we should be struggling. Yet it’s clear that we’ve had a pretty resilient economy. What has Trump done? The two things Paul Krugman hates most: Regulatory rollbacks and tax cuts. And yet here we are."

Krugman: Beware Economists Who Won't Admit They Were Wrong - "Everybody is dunking on Paul Krugman’s latest column, “Beware Economists Who Won’t Admit They Were Wrong,” and rightfully so. He is frequently tricky and slippery (and terribly out of touch).  This column is no exception... Krugman begins by declaring victory. The economy, under the wise stewardship of Joe Biden, has had “one of the best years ever” because inflation is under control and unemployment hasn’t shot up.  He compares FOMC projections (which are often way off, by the way) from earlier in the year to what current data suggests, and points out that both price inflation and unemployment are doing better than expected.  Krugman’s triumph is made explicit about 300 words in: “Soft landing achieved.”  After some storytelling and victory-lapping, he gets noticeably squirmy: “Last year we didn’t know that the inflation story would turn out this well, and to be fair, rate hikes have not, in fact, caused a recession, at least so far” (emphasis added).  He’s cushioning against the prospect of a 2024 recession. He wants to be able to say he was right about “transitory inflation” and the soft landing, even in the event of a hard landing. This is why he has been so quick to cash in on the disinflation of 2023, even when Krugman’s tortured inflation statistics hit 3 percent. No future crisis, no matter how imminent, will prove him wrong, at least in his own eyes.  Indeed, he begins the next paragraph with, “What worries me is the future.” If a recession comes, it will be because the Fed listened to the wrong economists and hesitated in cutting interest rates. He says these economists are willing to risk a recession just to save face."

Robert P. Murphy on X - "I just want to make sure you folks understand how amazing his move is. To review:
1) Summers said we need to hike rates to rein in inflation, too bad will cause a recession.
2) Krugman said no, inflation is transitory, it will come down w/o rate hikes, which would only cause a needless recession.
3) Fed listens to Summers and jacks up rates hard.
4) Inflation comes down. Krugman says, "See? No recession, inflation was transitory, I was right."
5) Krugman admits there still could be a recession. But if it happens, it will be because of the rate hikes, which were unnecessary because inflation came down w/o a recession."

Meme - Spider in web: "SPIDER-GOO, SPIDER-GOO. HOT AND STICKY SPIDER-GOO. IT GETS MADE, IN MY GUT. THEN IT SQUIRTS, OUT MY BUTT. OH GOD!! HERE COMES MY SPIDER-GOO!"
Fly in web: "JUST EAT ME ALREADY, YOU FREAK!"

Spike Cohen on X - "80,000 pounds of Costco butter was just recalled, because the label doesn't say that it contains milk. It's butter. News articles are telling people how they can return, or safely dispose of, the butter. It's butter."
If people are really so stupid, then non-butter butters should not be allowed to call themselves butter

Meme - "Nobody makes a black man smile the way a White Woman does"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "This woman is Courtney Clenney and she actually killed her boyfriend Christian Obumseli"

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "On big culture war issues, where do Democrats have an advantage with the public? On abortion and guns.  Where do Republicans have an advantage? On everything else."
"Public Views on Culture Issues. Net support for progressive views
Abortion +27%. Guns +13%. They/them -5%. Build the Wall -7%. Police -26%. Affirmative Action -36%. Trans Puberty Blockers -37%. Boys in Girls' Sports -43%. Immigration Serious Problem -46%. tsrael vs. Hamas -62%"

Meme - Coddled affluent professional @feelsdesperate: "I think libs are very habituated to their mental illness and it’s a strength.  Someone like Will Stancil is clearly unwell but he just posts through it unflinchingly.  In comparison, if there’s anything not favorable conservatives really get put back on their heels and blackpill."
Will Stancil: "politics causes me real agony. it messes with my focus, with my sleep, I spend a substantial amount of time fighting off dread and alarm over trump, fascism, climate, the rising tide of institutionalized racism. these guys, I feel like they sit around feeling fine"

J.D. Haltigan, PhD 🏒👨‍💻 on X - "The clinical levels of mental illness in the contemporary left is a national crisis."
Random on X - "A huge part of the value proposition of social media is it provides a medium by which people insecure about their version of reality can leverage other people to validate it. Basically the more shrill and demanding they are the more insecure they probably are."
marilyn maupin on X - "I'm doing everything i can to destroy my own mental health, why aren't my enemies sad"
Dan Peters on X - "You forget the whiny leftist rule, the more something hurts you the more of a victim you are and the more you deserve total power over the situation."

Richard Hanania on X - "I wish @elonmusk  and @VivekGRamaswamy  the best of luck with DOGE. I’m sure they’ll find many ways to make government more efficient, but it’ll be important to keep in mind that the increase in the federal budget in the coming decades is going to be due almost entirely to Social Security and Medicare, in addition to interest on debt.  See that charts below. The things people mainly complain about, discretionary spending and foreign policy, are steady. They are manageable with GDP growth and do not pose a major threat to American living standards, even if nothing is cut.  Yet Social Security and Medicare are going to eat the budget. What makes this odd is that seniors are the wealthiest demographic in America. We are taking from the young, people who are figuring out whether to have children, and giving it to old people past their reproductive years who as a group have more money than those they’re taking from.  This needs to end. Taking on gerontocracy, mainly entitlement spending, is the issue that will help deal with a constellation of problems, from low birth rates to the economic prospects of young people to the fiscal health of the country. Few things are as important as this."

Emily Ekins on X - "Fascinating read from @NateSilver538 on psychological profiles between Rs and Ds and response to disagreement. It's consistent with public opinion data about speech and social media behavior"
The model exactly predicted the most likely election map - "Even though our forecast was near 50/50 for almost the whole race, there were certainly periods that were relatively better and worse for Harris and Trump. Our narrative content followed accordingly, with about an even mix of newsletters that presented optimistic cases for Harris and Trump. (That was not true when Joe Biden was running, but that’s because Biden was way behind in the polls.) So I essentially got to perform a randomized control trial on how partisans in both camps reacted to good and bad news.  And there was an asymmetry. Republicans are generally happy when you agree with them partway or half the time. Admittedly, the sorts of Republicans who encounter our work are not a representative sample, probably being on the moderate side — though you can find plenty of Trump supporters in the Silver Bulletin comments section.  Democrats, however — and here, I’m not referring so much to Silver Bulletin subscribers but in the broader universe online — often get angry with you when you only halfway agree with them. And I really think this difference in personality profiles tells you a little something about why Trump won: Trump was happy to take on all comers, whereas with Democrats, disagreement on any hot-button topic (say, COVID school closures or Biden’s age) will have you cast out as a heretic. That’s not a good way to build a majority, and now Democrats no longer have one."
This coheres with the research on left wingers being less tolerant of dissent and also manifests in the circular firing squad of the left

Meme - ""I would end a friendship because my friend expressed a political view that I find inappropriate."
Agreement by Political Orientation and Generation
Gen Z: Liberal 45%. Moderate 24%. Conservative 24%
Millennial: Liberal 39%. Moderate 16%. Conservative 19%
Gen X: Liberal 23%. Moderate 10%. Conservative 14%
Boomer: Liberal 24%. Moderate 10%. Conservative 12%
Data Source: Presidential Election Study 2024 (n = 2,949)
"I would end my relationship with a family member if they expressed a political view that I find inappropriate."
Agreement by Political Orientation and Generation
Gen Z: Liberal 36%. Moderate 19%. Conservative 21%
Millennial: Liberal 36%. Moderate 14%. Conservative 19%
Gen X: Liberal 21%. Moderate 9%. Conservative 11%
Boomer: Liberal 16%. Moderate 7%. Conservative 8%
Data Source: Presidential Election Study 2024 (n = 2,949)"
Once again replicating all the other research. The breakdown by generation and relationship type further confirms the research finding that liberals and left wingers are the most intolerant

Meme - Anchovy Pizza: "There's an extremely cute viet girl on one of the other shifts that I have a crush on, at this point I don't know how I I have anything left to lose and I'm kind of thinking of just walking up to her out of the blue and asking her on a date also I have confirmed shes single"
"We're getting married in 4 months. Holy cow"

Meme - "2011-05-10_18-57-46_Switzerland_-_Wil_crop.jpg 1.93 MB JPG
>there exist magic rocks that can boil water
>boiling water gives us energy
>we stop using the magic rocks because they exploded that one time
are we retarded? imagine if pre historic peoples stopped using fire just because some retard burnt his house down once"

Meme - "r/agender
I start crying when I'm taken out of densely populated areas.
Greetings. I'm a nineteen year old agender human. I've lived in Manhattan my entire life, and I really have no desire to leave. Since I was young when I've been taken to rural/ suburban areas I've started crying. There's something about them that makes me really hate them, they feel so boring and lonely, and whenever I'm there I get worried that I'm not going to be able to leave, or sad because I know they exist. Even now that I'm an adult I just start crying or panicking when I'm there."
Left wingers like to mock conservatives who are scared of cities, but many of them are scared of leaving cities

sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to... – @askfordoodles on Tumblr - "sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it
new guy: why is all of the equipment in this room covered in toys?
me: dONn’t touch those
new guy:
me: they need the toys to function. if they don’t all have toys they get jealous.
new guy:
new guy:
me: when something breaks just take the wizard and wave it around for a while. they seem to like that."
"Science is rational, scientists are human."
"In Taiwan we have a special brand of snacks named 乖乖 (literally means “well behaved” but in a casual way like when one’s compliment a child or a pet of being good) that has green package.  It has become the lucky charm in the IT industry because engineers believe it will make machine acting good (like the name of the snack) and stay in green light (like the color of the snack’s package) when a 乖乖 is put on top of a server.  It is the only food allowed in a server room and the biggest semicondoctor company in Taiwan (which is also the biggest worldwide) even commissioned the snack factory to make a customized version with blessing on the package. This is how a server room is blessed by 乖乖. You put at least one on top of each server. It’s important that the engineers change them before the expire date because legend says the snack looses it’s power after expire date. You’ll hear engineers swearing up and down that their server room  crushed down the one time they forgot to change the snack.  Or some  newbie ate the forbidden snack put on top of their server and caused a  disastrous crush down.   The 乖乖 religion later spread to all people who want their machine to act nice. In the lab we put 乖乖 on ultra-low freezer (you really don’t want it to drop dead along with your 2 years’ worth of sample/data), mass  spectrometer etc.   When Taiwan’s about to launch the first self made satellite in 2017, the develop team even put 乖乖 around the satellite model to prey for a successful launch (it did). This shit is real."

Links - 30th January 2025 (2 - Migrants)

Home Office says only half of UK asylum decisions meet its quality standards

Sam Ashworth-Hayes on X - "The UK gave out 1.1 million visas in the year to September. This insanity has been driven by short-termism, shifting costs into the future through pensions and welfare in exchange for a short term sugar rush - and to avoid fixing things the government broke. 🧵
We can start with the care worker visa. This was essentially invented to get out of a jam: local authorities paid for care, local authorities had no money, the Treasury was presumably too busy funding migrant hotels and train driver pay rises to bail them out. Rather than grudgingly give British workers a pay rise, the Government decided to firehose in labour to hold wages down. Once you see this pattern of using immigration to cover up problems, you see it everywhere.
Universities are going broke and fee rises are unpopular? Maintain demand by pushing students through undemanding courses in exchange for post-study working rights!
Destroyed your ability to train doctors due to union pressure? Substitute in lower quality replacements!  This isn't a large route in terms of quantity - 12,148 doctors in 2022 and 24,000 nurses - so the NHS would be fine if you halved migration. But it illustrates the point.
When people tell you immigration is the lifeblood of our economy they're telling you they've not looked at the figures.  Of that 1.1 million visas, just 241,000 were to work applicants. Some 211,000 visas went to their dependants - around 130k for the 51k health and social care visas, a ratio of more than two dependants for each worker. The bulk of the rest is the university Ponzi scheme. 392,000 visas, 47,000 extensions. And 159,000 graduate route extensions on top of that!
So to summarise: rather than building a system that takes in the best and brightest, selectively, we're bringing in huge numbers to avoid addressing failed systems."
Clearly, if you stop refugees coming in, the NHS will collapse

Matt Goodwin on X - "The British people just paid £5.4 billion last year to manage our broken & failing asylum system
Let’s do some number crunching shall we? We took winter fuel payments off our British pensioners to save £1.5 billion. That’s 27% of the asylum budget. Our local councils just cut frontline services to save £564 million on adult social care overspend.   No more Wheels on Meals for Nan, then, and no more libraries.   That’s 10% of the asylum budget. We just smashed family farms up & down these islands to raise £520 million when Mum and Dad die.   That’s not even 10% of the asylum budget. Sorry you have to sell your farm and home that’s been in your family and community for generations.  We have to put Vietnamese illegal migrants in hotels and give them cash cards and phones.   Worried about crime? We just penciled in £450 million in budget cuts for the Metropolitan police.   That’s 8% of the asylum budget
Sorry we can’t solve burglaries or stop the de facto legalisation of shoplifting and gang violence. We have to give illegal migrants from Iraq, some of whom have gone on deal cocaine and heroin, free healthcare on the NHS. Worried about Russia, China, and our enemies?   We just handed the Ministry of Defence cuts of £500 million. That’s 9% of the asylum budget. Sorry we can’t keep Britain safe. We have to pay for illegal migrants from Afghanistan, some of whom have gone on to murder young Brits like Thomas Roberts (google him)
Worried about our schools?   We have a £1.5 billion black hole in the education budget. That’s 27% of the asylum budget.  I could go on. The point is that all these examples reflect specific political choices.   And the political choice of both Labour and the Tories for much of the last decade, if not longer, has been to prioritise anybody and everybody except the hardworking, tax paying British people
Illegal migration is making us poorer, costing us billions and pushing us into managed decline. Look around. We are being pushed into Immigration Austerity. The fact that Labour, the so-called “party of the working-class”, can’t even bring itself to do what needs to be done to fix this scandal (leave the ECHR, reform the HRA, and have a deterrent) speaks volumes. You are not their priority. In the end, the people who will suffer will once again be you, the British people, and your children. You deserve more than this. Great Britain deserves more than this."
Clearly, if you're not in favor of the asylum budget being unlimited, you're a racist, xenophobic bigot who doesn't know that this can all be paid for by "taxing the "rich""

Meme - "Net Costs to the British Economy & Taxpayer PA (Sources: GOV.UK, OBR, NAO, BBC)"
"The combined revenue and savings from the farmer tax, the private school VAT levy, lifting the 2 quid bus ticket cap and scrapping chunks of the winter fuel payment all account to less than half of annual spending on "asylum". Lol, Imao even."

Cost of UK asylum system hits record £5.4billion - "Home Office spending on asylum has surged by more than a third in a year to nearly £5.4billion to hit the highest figure since records began - with 66 per cent arriving on small boats being granted leave to remain. The eyewatering bill includes all the department's costs related to asylum, including direct cash support and accommodation, but excludes costs relating to the interception of migrants in the Channel... By way of comparison, the most recent bill is nearly half the £10.4bn spent on the Ministry of Justice, which runs the country's legal system, and more than the total annual spend on all the UK's intelligence services... Ms Badenoch warned yesterday that immigration levels are 'a world away from where we need to be'.  She promised a 'strict numerical cap' on arrivals, with only those able to make a 'substantial and clear contribution' to Britain allowed in. She will review Britain's membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the continuation of Labour's Human Rights Act, which have both been blamed for blocking past attempts to get tough."
How many farms would be affected by Budget changes? - "The Treasury expects that the changes to inheritance tax , as well as changes to Business Tax Relief, will raise £230m in 2026-27, the first year of their introduction."
Budget bus fare row: 'The £2 cap was a rare policy that dramatically improves lives – it's so cheap people talk about it' - "Increasing the bus fare cap to £3 will save the government around £350 million upfront"
VAT on private school fees - "It is estimated that this will raise £460 million in 2024/25"
Changes to Winter Fuel Payment eligibility rules - "It is expected to save around £1.3 billion in 2024/25 and £1.5 billion in subsequent years."

Breaking point - "What makes a nation? I’d suggest six things.  A people who share a common territory, who feel a shared identity, who have a collective memory or history, speak a common language, have a similar set of values, and as a result of all these things, have a distinctive culture and way of life.  Yes, economic prosperity matters. But much more important than money, than GDP, as philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said, is a deep and powerful sense that ‘we belong together and that we will stand by each other in the real emergencies’.  A nation, in other words, requires a “we” —a deep sense of unity that transcends politics and markets.  And for that you need something else —social trust. For a nation to work and survive, its people must be willing to trust others in the community they do not know but who they support because they see them contributing to the collective pot, playing by the rules, and preserving and passing on the same cultural inheritance.  Which raises a different question. How, then, might you destroy a nation?  You would undermine all these things. You would, either gradually or suddenly, strip away this belief among people that they share a distinctive identity, history, and culture. You would flood the national community with outsiders who do not contribute to the collective pot, who do not play by the rules, and who hold radically different if not incompatible identities, histories, religions, cultures and ways of life.  And in this way, slowly but surely, you would erode and then finally destroy that much deeper sense of “we” which lies at the very heart of a nation, has been built up over countless generations and holds it together.  Sound familiar? I ask because I suspect that’s how many people in Britain will be feeling today when they cast their eyes over the latest statistics, released yesterday, about how mass, uncontrolled immigration is fundamentally changing the nature of their country.  What we can see in the shocking numbers is a national community and a people that are now being subjected —against their wishes— to an extreme policy that is transforming, undermining, and hollowing out the country they once knew.  They are astonishing and alarming in equal measure.  In the year ending June 2024, some 1.2 million people —equivalent to a city the size of Birmingham—migrated into Britain.  And more than 1 million of them came from outside Europe —from countries that have completely different if not incompatible histories, religions, and cultures.  Here’s just one of many mind-boggling statistics I could put before you.  Astonishingly, today, some 86% of all immigration into Britain comes from outside Europe —typically from India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, and Zimbabwe. In fact, in every year since 2022 immigration from outside Europe represented more than 80% of all immigration into Britain... The vast majority of immigrants flooding into Britain are now coming from countries that have much lower levels of education, skills, and prosperity, as well as religions and cultures that are utterly different from those that incubate European nations.  How can you build an integrated, cohesive, prosperous, and high-trust society on this? Can anybody in the expert class tell me? Does anybody even have a plan?... This number is more than twice the number when the British people voted for Brexit, in 2016, believing their elected politicians when they said this would help “lower the overall numbers”, and more than three times the number when the Tories came to power in 2010, similarly promising to slash net migration to the “tens of thousands”... At what point, one might ask, did our mainstream politicians on both the Left and Right decide they would not only consistently ignore people’s request for lower immigration but also completely destroy people’s trust in the entire system?  Because that’s what they’re doing. They’re treating hardworking, tax-paying people with contempt, promising one thing only to then do the complete opposite while lying to their face. Full-scale revolutions have started from less.  While all this is further hollowing out the shared sense of “we” that has long guided our nation, it’s also unquestionably making us poorer, too —even if the pro-migration zealots in the Treasury, charities, universities, and the elite class refuse to accept it.  For example, here’s another shocking statistic you won’t hear about on BBC Verify. What percentage of immigrants who have come to Britain since 2018 came on work visas —to do decent jobs, on decent money, making a net contribution to the pot?  16%... the situation is now so absurd that last year relatives of migrant workers outnumbered actual migrant workers!... what we’re now living with is what I call “immigration austerity” —a policy that’s pushing us all into a low-growth, dismal, and unproductive Deliveroo economy with shabby and declining public services to go with it.  A place that works well for global corporations addicted to cheap labour and radical woke progressives for whom pro-immigration is a new religion, but which does not work at all for the Forgotten Majority in this country who are left to pay the price.  And the economic price is clear for all to see.  As even the Office for Budget Responsibility has been forced to point out, every low-wage, low-skill migrant entering Britain today, usually from outside Europe, costs the British taxpayer, on average, between £150,000 and £1 million. But look too at the astronomical economic cost of our broken asylum system, released yesterday. Last year, the British people paid —wait for it— £5.4 billion on the asylum system, which is visibly failing to deal with illegal migration... All these numbers reflect political choices and our leaders on both the Left and Right have clearly chosen to represent anybody and everybody except the British people.  We’re now having to say goodbye to winter fuel payments for our grandparents, family farms that have been here for generations, public services in our communities, and safe streets all so we can put illegal migrants from places as different as Vietnam and Iraq, who have already broken our laws, including a not insignificant number who go on to commit further crimes, into fancy-looking hotels with cash cards, phones, and private healthcare. And over time we’ll have to say goodbye to many other things, too.  Because when a nation so visibly stops putting its own people first, when its leaders stop cultivating that shared sense of identity, history, culture, and way of life that has long held it together, you have to wonder what will happen to that deeper sense of “we”. And in the end, I suspect that this will be the price we are forced to pay. The price will not just be measured in money but in the destruction of all those things that make a nation and which have long held us together in this place we call home."

Sanctuary city Denver spending a whopping $356 million on migrants: study - "Denver has seen an unprecedented influx of migrants arrive in the city under the Biden-Harris administration and Johnston has already slashed city services to house and feed those migrants. Cuts included reducing services at recreation centers and stopping the planting of spring flower beds, while the city tapped into a contingency fund to pay for the spiraling costs... Meanwhile, Denver doctors earlier this year said that the migrant crisis had pushed the state’s hospital system to its breaking point and was causing a humanitarian crisis... Johnston said during a recent interview that he was prepared to protest against anything he believes is "illegal or immoral or un-American" in the city – including the use of military force – and was then asked if he was prepared to go to jail for standing in the way of policies enacted by the administration. "Yeah, I'm not afraid of that, and I'm also not seeking that," Johnston said. "I think the goal is we want to be able to negotiate with reasonable people [on] how to solve hard problems." Tom Homan, Trump's "border czar" designate, told Fox News' Sean Hannity this week that he would jail Johnston if he broke the law in shielding illegal migrants."
Virtue signalling has very real costs. Time to blame Trump
Nobody is above the law - unless they are pushing the left wing agenda

1,700 years ago, the mismanagement of a migrant crisis cost Rome its empire - "The military officials who were in charge of provisions for the Goths—an ancient version of the support offered to migrants arriving in Greece or Italy—were corrupt and profited off of what was meant for the refugees. The starving Goths were forced to buy dog meat from the Romans.  Marcellinus has no doubt: “their treacherous covetousness was the cause of all our [the Romans’] disasters.”  The trust between the abused Goths and the Romans was broken several times before Adrianople, and the Goths went from wanting to become Roman to wanting to destroy Rome.  Less than two years later, Marcellinus writes, “with rage flashing in their eyes, the barbarians pursued our men.” And they took down the empire."
Of course, the failure of integration in European welfare states shows that they must do more to help migrants and be even more generous to them, and not accepting migrants is not an option

Meme - "60 years of immigration *shit from Central and South America and Africa on North America and Europe*"
This is a response to that strip claiming that the Global South was exploited by the Global North

Chris Cillizza on X - "A new @scrippsnews poll find 54% of voters support the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A CBS poll in June put the number at 62%. It's now clear that a majority of the public supports this proposal. This is how Trump wins. But can he stay on message??"
Clearly most Americans are "far right" extremists who hate legal immigrants, and need to be sent to reeducation camps

Wesley Yang on X - "Illegal immigrants are enterprising figures who made a bet that the country they went to in violation of the laws wouldn't deport them. For tens of millions of them between 1985 and the present, it was a good bet. That's fine. The politics of their receiving countries may change to make this no longer a good bet. That's also fine."
Wesley Yang on X - "I don't expect mass deportations to happen because of the cost and practical difficulty. But some gestures to symbolize the end of many decades of tolerance of illegal immigration seem likely if Trump wins. (And possibly even if he doesn't.) If you just close the asylum loophole, the problem will mostly be solved."

Italy has cut illegal migration by 60%: How have they done it? - "Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Meloni's government's approach to tackling organised immigration crime is something Starmer is looking at... Since becoming prime minister in 2022, Meloni has signed deals with individual African countries to try to block departures of immigrants... The third part of Italy's immigration policy is their approach to returning asylum seekers who have claims denied to their countries of origin... A further part of Italy's immigration policy highlighted by the home secretary is a deal made with Albania.  Meloni's government has a third-country processing agreement with the Balkan nation."
Too bad Starmer scrapped the Rwanda plan just as Parliament finally overruled the UK courts

Britain has most illegal migrants in Europe, study finds - "Britain is home to more illegal migrants than any other European nation, a new study has found.  There are up to 745,000 illegal migrants in the UK, accounting for one in 100 of the population, according to the research led by Oxford University experts.  This is more than double the 300,000 in France and ahead even of the upper estimate of 700,000 in Germany, which has the second-largest population of illegal migrants in Europe... Senior Tories demanded that Sir Keir Starmer rethink Labour’s approach after the Prime Minister scrapped a scheme in which asylum seekers would have been sent to Rwanda while they were processed.  The Government is under intense pressure to tackle people-smuggling gangs responsible for the crisis, and to crack down on crime committed by migrants in Britain. The Telegraph disclosed last week that one in 50 Albanians in the UK is in jail... The up to 745,000 people estimated to have come to Britain illegally include foreign arrivals who have overstayed their visas, failed asylum seekers who have disappeared and some migrants who have crossed the Channel in small boats... Sir Keir has rejected calls to quit the ECHR to help tackle the crisis, and at the weekend French and European sources told The Telegraph that Britain would only get an EU deal to send Channel migrants back to France if it remained in the European Court of Human Rights... The 745,000 illegal migrants – equivalent to a city the size of Leeds – come on top of the overall backlog of 224,742 asylum seekers who are awaiting a decision on their claim, appealing a rejection, or have exhausted or not yet exercised their appeal rights."
Still 1/3 the US proportion

'We were totally betrayed' – 500 migrants for tiny German village of 600 will nearly double population - "A small village in Brandenburg, Petersdorf, will receive 500 migrants despite having only 600 residents, and local residents are outraged, alienated, and feel helpless. It is a story happening across Germany and is likely to only fuel anti-immigrant resentment.  Petersdorf is situated next to Bad Saarow, a spa town, and is known for attracting Berliners for the weekend for its thermal baths, restaurants and beautiful views of the local lake, the Scharmützelsee,  However, just outside the town in an old army barracks, which the local district is planning to convert into a home for hundreds of migrants. It is the type of story that conservative critics say is further evidence of the Great Replacement, which describes the ongoing demographic replacement of Europeans in their native lands by non-Western immigrants. While the left describes it as a “conspiracy theory,” the right states it is an irrefutable fact supported by data, and in many ways, illustrated clearly by these types of cases.   The barracks are a four-story building that can house 300 men, but they are set to be expanded, including with the installation of residential “containers.” Construction teams are already at work and are set to soon finish. In total, the accommodations will house 500 migrants. The plans for the construction are moving forward despite the local council unanimously voting against expansion plans a year ago. Once the men are settled, there will be nearly as many migrants as residents. The German government is running out of spaces in the cities, but there is never an end to more newcomers, which has led to a push in small towns and rural areas. Over the years, German newspaper Welt reports that many other small towns have undergone a similar fate, including Upahl, Dabel, Seeth, and Bernkastel-Kues, and “there was trouble every time.”   In many cases, there is little offered in terms of planning for how social services and infrastructure will cope with the newcomers, including even the removal of sewage. Once again, this is the case for Bad Saarow and Petersdorf. The local mayor of Petersdorf, Thomas Schoppe, told the local paper Märkische Oderzeitung that the containers were already being built “while the local council was still discussing it.”"
It's only oligarchy when the unimplemented will of the majority pushes the left wing agenda

US woman, 20, accidentally stabs Eritrean, 64, to death during struggle after he groped her at German train station - and now faces 10 years in prison - "An American woman accidentally stabbed an Eritrean to death during a struggle after he groped her at a German train station - and now faces up to ten years in prison.  The woman, 20, was standing on an escalator at Kaiserslautern train station, in the southwestern state of Rhineland-Palatinate, when the 64-year-old man grabbed her backside on June 29.  An argument ensued before the woman drew a folding knife and made stabbing movements at the man.   The American, who lives in Kaiserslautern, told investigators she wanted to keep the man at a distance. When he finally backed away, the woman followed.   The Eritrean man grabbed her arm holding the knife and as the woman tried to free herself, she stabbed him in the heart 'during the same movement', according to prosecutors. He died within seconds."

Australia immigration: Bridget McKenzie says public support for migration has ‘snapped’, as Premier Roger Cook seeks legal advice on delaying West Australian election - "The long-held social compact that migration is good for the country has “snapped” due to the cost-of-living crisis and the post-pandemic surge in arrivals, Coalition frontbencher Bridget McKenzie says...   Days after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said migration levels and the cost of living would be at the forefront of his election campaign, the Nationals senator and infrastructure spokeswoman said universities, big business, government bureaucracy and the union movement had benefited at the expense of first home buyers, renters and people with mortgages.  “We have, to some degree, a bipartisan approach to the economics of migration. We have a de facto population policy whereby we agree that immigration is important to the economic growth of our nation, but in the last couple of years, that compact with the Australian people has snapped,” Senator McKenzie told The Australian Financial Review Infrastructure Summit on Monday.  “It is actually making real people’s daily lives worse, increasing traffic congestion and hospital waiting lists. That is the reality in our suburbs … that Australians are struggling with each and every day.”"

Meme - Arthur Sido @ArthurSido: "Weird how people flee from countries full of people like themselves to come to countries full of people like me and then immediately start scolding me because I am not more like the people they fled from in the first place."
White people are uniquely evil, which is why they need to be culturally enriched

CBS Sacramento on X - "California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond is proposing a statewide policy that school districts do not cooperate with ICE."
Thread by @skepticaliblog on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The MS-13 gang clique that was based in a San Fernando Valley high school murdered at least 10 people, including a 16-year-old student at the school.  One victim had their heart cut out by machete.  19 of the 22 defendants entered the country illegally
The school officials did not inform or warn parents even after a 16-year-old student was murdered (they lied and referred to him as "missing").  They knew there was a MS-13 clique based in the school.  They knew they were killing people"

Meme - pagliacci the hated 🌝 @Slatzism: "its funny that this is supposed to be a sympathetic comic portraying the plight of migrants and instead it just accidentally proved everyone right that they’re just young men shopping around for a country with the best benefits"
MSF Sea @MSF_Sea: "We were arrested, and after being released from prison, I decided to LEAVE. KUWAIT -> TURKIYE -> GREECE -> GERMANY -> CALAIS, FRANCE"

Suspect in New York City subway fire killing charged with murder, arson - "The man accused of killing a woman on a New York City subway train by setting her on fire was charged with murder and arson in an initial court appearance on Dec 24.  Sebastian Zapeta, a 33-year-old man who police say lives at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, was charged with three counts in a criminal complaint at the Brooklyn criminal court: first-degree murder, second-degree murder and first-degree arson.  According to the police account, Zapeta used a lighter to ignite the clothes of a woman who appeared to be sleeping on a stationary F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue subway station on Dec 22. He then used a shirt to fan the fire until the woman was engulfed in flames, the complaint said... The US Department of Homeland Security said on Dec 23 that Zapeta is a Guatemalan citizen who had entered the country unlawfully and that they would eventually bring removal proceedings against him."

Meme - "'DEPRAVED BEHAVIOR'. Illegal migrant allegedly set train passenger on fire and watched her burn to death"
"I can't imagine why no one attempted to help her *Daniel Penny arrested and in handcuffs*"

Eric Daugherty on X - "HOLY SH*T! NYC Mayor Eric Adams just dared the left to "cancel" him over working with Border Czar Tom Homan and Trump. "Cancel me because I'm going to protect the people of this city." He says illegals are "committing crimes, robberies, sh*oting at police, r*ping innocent people.""

Opinion | Why Trump’s Deportations Will Drive Up Your Grocery Bill - The New York Times
From Paul Krugman. Weird. Left wingers keep claiming that mass migration doesn't lower wages, but somehow mass deportations will raise wages. This voodoo economics is very odd indeed

Ragging on Military Spending

I've seen the following cartoon shared more than once, but this time I got annoyed enough by the obvious misinformation to formally fact check it:

"This comic is over 80 years old and yet you don't have to change a thing about it. It's every bit as relevant today as the day it was drawn.

*People at tables*
Education: *nothing*
Sciences: *nothing*
Arts: *nothing*
Healthcare: *nothing*
War: *4 waiters bringing lots of 'food' (money) to table*"

If we look at the actual numbers, a very different story emerges. I couldn't find a single data source for more than one of these figures, but the numbers are so different in magnitude that slight calculation variations are not going to change the end result.

Firstly, military spending (i.e. war).

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2023 global military expenditure was $2443 billion (or $2.4 trillion).

This may sound like a lot, but according to the World Bank, in 2021 total global spending education was $5.4 trillion, and in 2023 it was doubtless higher (given the trend of year-on-year increases).

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization tells us that in 2021, global spending on health was $9.8 trillion. Perhaps one thinks might object that this was due to covid, yet in 2017 it was $7.8 trillion.

Spending on science is harder to quantify, but according to UNESCO, global research & development (R&D) spending is almost $1.7 trillion (no year is given). Meanwhile I was unable to find numbers for global arts spending.

So spending on education and healthcare are each significantly higher than that on war. When you add education, healthcare and R&D up, the total of the 3 far exceeds that for war.

Of course, one might claim that the cartoon really means that the war industry is "overfed" and the other sectors are starved, based on some wishy-washy benchmark that will never be quantified, because the people making this argument just hate spending on defence, but that is not an argument that can be addressed logically.

Links - 30th January 2025 (1 - General Wokeness [including Reddit Censorship])

Thread by @reddit_lies on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The Cancer of Censorship. How Reddit set itself up to become one of the most heavily censored social media platforms. (and how it may be destroying itself because of it) 🧵
Moderating is a time-consuming thankless job. Instead of hiring in-house mods or relying on algorithmic moderation, Reddit relies on an army of 70,000+ volunteers to do this heavy lifting. Volunteers were chosen because algorithmic moderation struggles when each subreddit has its own rules, memes, and political views.  It also (theoretically) ensured moderators were passionate participants in the community.
But there were unforeseen side-effects... For many moderators, the power associated with being a mod is an afterthought.  But for some that power IS their compensation. They want to moderate BECAUSE it gives them a pathway to a position of authority over others.
Think about it for a moment.  What kind of person would opt to spend 12+ hours a day doing the dirty work of a social media company all for free?  It appeals to people who crave power with a lot of time on their hands.  Enter "Powermods". These powermods often subscribe to the bleeding edge of progressive rhetoric, and they can be frequently found using their power to ensure users conform to the latest left-leaning talking points. Powermods are commonly seen pinning their own posts and comments to the top of subreddits and comment sections.  Their goal is simple: Keep the unwashed masses in line and drive the narrative forward by any means necessary. Often times they will lock down entire threads because the users "couldn't behave" (adhere to approved talking points)
Given that mods (and Reddit as a whole) is so ideologically captured, you will often see them using their power to simultaneously promote misinformation AND suppress the truth. Worse still, most moderators turn a blind eye to highly inflammatory rhetoric if it happens to align with the narrative.  Often you can find Redditors salivating at the thought of murdering someone (a violation of Reddit's TOS) but the otherwise ban-happy mods turn a blind eye.
Some subreddits have even begun mass banning thousands of users who have ever participated in right-leaning subreddits such as r/Conservative.
Why doesn't Reddit do anything about this?  Because Reddit mods do an estimated $3.4 Million in labor all for free each year. Reddit likely can't afford such a bill, so unpaid mods have festered like a cancer on the platform for years.
Social media sites THRIVE on free-speech.  When power-hungry censorious moderators actively target people for speaking freely, the result is a cooling of speech sitewide.  This is the inevitable result:
Ultimately, the actions of these mods may be costing Reddit dearly. It's not common to see social media sites stagnate the way Reddit has in recent years.  This is just conjecture, but I suspect the heavy-handedness of the moderators is a major contributor here.
I'm not sure what steps Reddit can take to remedy this issue, or if they even will, but we should all look to Reddit as a cautionary tale of what can happen when control of speech is delegated without any accountability."
One could claim that since subreddits are moderated by different moderators, this isn't proof of bias by reddit, but there is clearly bias in how subreddits are banned, so

Meme - Reddit Lies @reddit_lies: "Reddit is a ghost town now.  The largest subreddit (r/funny) has 60 million members but had only 44 posts in the past 24 hours.  r/Apple, 5 million, only had 9 posts over 24 hours.  TBH I don’t think Reddit survives past the 2024 election after the bots turn off."
"What subreddit has the most active users in relation to its members?"
"r/whatifalthist. Only 9k subs but gets several posts with over 1000 upvotes and hundreds of comments every week"
"r/Whatifalthist is banned. This community was banned for violating Reddit's rule against promoting hate."

Update on the sub - Reddit doesn't want to lift the shadow ban on this sub. : r/Canada_sub - "Back in July, Reddit shadow banned this sub so that it was basically hidden on Reddit so it wouldn't show up on the popular page or in people's feeds. It absolutely killed off the sub growth and activity.  Finding out about the shadow ban was difficult as Reddit has been very evasive on giving details about it. I'm not even sure who banned it whether it was a person or an automated system. Anyway apparently it was because of "excess" removals. Which is just Reddit removing comments it feels are breaking rules. I'll admit that there were quite a lot of things getting removed back then.  I noticed that most of those bad comments were coming from certain types of accounts. New accounts, older hardly used accounts, some that never come here but would drop in to say something bad....So I made many changes to the sub and then eventually went with the drastic change over to the flair system to prevent all of these accounts from having their comments be visible on the sub. So whatever they post, no one sees it other than the mods and Reddit admins.  So I saw that the number of removals that have occurred by flaired users over the past while is way down to just a handful and some of those accounts lost their flairs as a result. Even the number of non-flaired hidden comments being removed is down but there was still quite a few of those as it's impossible to fully stop that from happening.  I asked Reddit to lift the shadow ban thinking they'd see that the "excess" removals are gone now. Nope, they don't want to lift the shadow ban. They said they still see a pattern of excess removals and they didn't care that the vast majority of those were never even visible on the sub to begin with. So this basically means that troll accounts have immense power over subs. They can target a sub and make all sorts of rule breaking comments to cause Reddit to come in and remove those whether they were visible or not, and the sub will get into trouble and eventually be shadow banned. That is crazy that Reddit gives that much power to trolls and bad actors on here. Perhaps they'd be more lenient on a left wing sub being targeted though....  Reddit has shadow banned quite a few subs tha allow right wing opinions and now it is clear that once a sub is shadow banned, Reddit is set up in a way that it is impossible to get that removed as you can't fully stop trolls from coming in and saying something bad to get Reddit to remove it.  As for the rule breaking stuff getting removed, Reddit has gone over the top on censoring comments and they've been removing more and more things that used to be fine. I wonder if it is just being done to keep the ban in place here.  Just today I saw someone (non-flaired) say that Liberal politicians should be tossed in jail for treason. That was removed as rule breaking...... I brought that up with the admins about just what is going on and that comment was later restored but that removal still counts against the sub......  I remember someone commented F***ing goof (they spelled it out) and it was just a reply towards a post about something Jagmeet Singh said. That was removed for rule breaking.......  There has been many similar types of removals occurring which has made me wonder if the sub is being targeted by a biased automated system or a biased human.  Anyway, it's clear Reddit is super biased and really wanting to censor things more now and since they don't want to lift the shadow ban on this sub, the sub is likely coming to an end shortly. It used to be fun running this sub, but Reddit has sucked all of the fun out of this. I guess Reddit has taken to shadow banning right wing subs so that they can leave them up but hidden so they can still try to claim the platform is for everyone. But Reddit really only promotes left wing subs now. Twitter and now Facebook are going with less censorship and Reddit is going the opposite direction of increased censorship. I guess we'll see which path wins over time.  I did all that work to clean up the sub, and it running better than it ever has, but Reddit just doesn't care. They want this sub hidden just because they don't like it. So enjoy the sub while it lasts."

Just heard back from Reddit. What a bizarre situation.... : r/Canada_sub - "Meanwhile during covid, the left was calling for extreme measures of dealing with non vaccinated people.. Calling for them to lose their jobs, be denied travel, denied Healthcare and I even saw leftist extremists calling for the deaths of non vaccinated people. Or atleast wishing them a slow and painful covid death. r/leopardsatemyface was nothing BUT wishing non vaccinated people would die terrible ironic deaths for most of the pandemic.  But that was totally fine and mainstream to "other" their fellow Canadians and wish them harm.  Better yet, how about all these islamist extremists literally calling for death to Canada and a global intifada?! Reddit seems perfectly fine allowing that level of hateful vitriol.  Sickening."
"And the Herman Cain awards sub. It doesn’t even seem like those could be really people commenting on there."
This is what left wing "empathy" and "kindness" look like

Just heard back from Reddit. What a bizarre situation.... : r/Canada_sub - "I got banned from the Edmonton sub for saying that if homeless people commit crimes we should arrest them. That’s it. They said I was inciting genocide. I messaged the mod that banned me the Oxford definition of genocide and the response was literally “I’ll show you” and a permanent ban.  I didn’t appeal because I don’t want to be associated with scum like that. I just muted the sub and got on with my life. I’m not going to play their game, power on Reddit is all they have."
"I was banned on a Reddit wide level (from Admin) for constructively criticizing Pride while being gay.  It's "hateful" to have opinions on (supposedly) my own community- even though I only have those opinions because I want the best for it."
"I was banned from r/standupcomedy for saying that a comedians joke about how people say they disagree with transgenderism because "they can't keep up with all the pronouns" isn't funny, it's just low effort pandering because no one actually says that."
Anything that obstructs the left wing agenda is "hate"

Just heard back from Reddit. What a bizarre situation.... : r/Canada_sub - "Not just downvoted, you get straight up banned.  I've been banned countless times for right leaning comments or opinions. Reddit admin has overturned every single one on review tbf to them. But the sub mods and the Reddit admins that banned me in the first place are just little rats"
"I've been banned for the reason of "inciting violence" for comments that literally had nothing to do with calling for violence.  It's just their excuse for shutting up people they don't agree with. The aggressive banning is a way to get people to self censor so reddit can spew it's bullshit that it's a platform for everyone like OP is saying."

Meme - ahackercalled4chan MOD: "i guarantee you that i can approve this post more times than you can report it"
"Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are Financing Censorship, Election interference, and the Persecution of me and other Journalists in Brazil -Michael Shellenberger"
"This is spam (35)
It's promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability (18)
It threatens violence or physical harm at someone else (4)
It's targeted harassment at someone else (3)
It encourages donations to charitable or political causes (2)
This content is impersonation (2)
The mod that stickied that comment is a fucking TOOL
Rule 1. Infringement of the Content Policy
It threatens violence or physical harm at me
It's content involving predatory or inappropriate behavior towards minors
It's sexual or suggestive content involving minors"
edit: report abusers can cope and seethe. I'm not taking it down
edit 2: 69 total reports. nice"
Left wingers love censorship. This is so ironic, coming from r/DeclineIntoCensorship

A.I. To Be Trained On Reddit To Make Sure It Never Becomes Too Intelligent | Babylon Bee

Why the West isn't racist - "A self-proclaimed “black radical”, Andrews wants to attack the root of the problem: the West itself and the “logic of empire” that organises it.  Unsurprisingly, ground zero for Andrews’ critique is the Enlightenment — the “sacred foundation of Western knowledge”, as he sardonically puts it. All our modern ideas of freedom and equality are traditionally traced back to this Age of Reason. Andrews argues against that narrative. Kant’s racist anthropology and Hume’s polygenism, he writes, “provided the universal and scientific framework of knowledge that maintained colonial logic”, which is the central organising principle of the current “political and economic system and therefore infects all interactions, institutions and ideas”... No matter how “the logic of empire” mutates, the premise is still the same: “The West is rich because the rest is poor”. As an epigone of Malcolm X, Andrews is not interested in interracial allyship as a solution. “The white left”, as he calls them, are too in thrall to the “psychosis of whiteness” to recognise that racism and imperialism are baked into their own politics. Echoing Maoism-Third Worldism, he chastises the white Left for failing to see that the “true revolutionary class has always resided outside the West”. As far as he’s concerned: “If you have come this far and believe that White people offering a meaningful hand of friendship is the solution, then you have missed the point.”  His solution is revolutionary Pan-Africanism — and has been for some time. In a 2018 video he made for the BBC, Andrews outlined his African utopia, his own Wakanda, materially rich and technologically advanced, where the diaspora will eventually return to their “African promised land”. In his book, he states his purpose is to develop “the politics of black radicalism, which centres on uniting Africa and the African diaspora to create a true revolution … the only true solution to the problem of racism”.   Andrews’s tract is uncompromising. His re-telling of the history of Western violence and the chronically poor state of Africa is potent. Interestingly, he is also critical of China and other upstart powers for using Africa as a “stepping stone” for their own development, while continuing the systematic “looting” of the continent. But Andrews ignores a number of contradictions that might puncture this worldview. Ironically Pan-Africanism, the ideology Andrews pledges fidelity to, is a bastard child of the West. It was westernised blacks that imagined a global black community with a common destiny transcending all nations, as a response to racial oppression (an idea rather similar to Zionism, a comparison Andrews wouldn’t be pleased with). Many of the icons of Pan-Africanism — Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X — hailed from the Americas, not Africa. Even native-born African adherents like Kwame Nkrumah were Western educated and very much influenced by the modernist impulses of Marxism.   But Andrews exhibits a common vice of contemporary radicalism: the idea that to be radical is to be disenchanted with all that is Western. It is rather fashionable, as the shrill calls to “decolonise” suggest, to believe that authentic radicalism regards the Enlightenment not as a resource in challenging imperialism but an imperial project itself. That narrative omits the fact that, while mainstream Enlightenment thinkers like Kant were rabid racists, the Enlightenment also provided the best tools to date for universal human liberation.   As Jonathan Israel has documented in his voluminous scholarship, there were two sides to the Enlightenment: a moderate and a radical wing. Funnily enough, all the individuals Andrews names in his galère of “dead white men” — Kant, Hume, Locke, Voltaire and Jefferson — were part of the Moderate Enlightenment, which was more elitist and conciliatory towards the old order. A different set of dead white men, inspired by Baruch Spinoza, made up the Radical Enlightenment — Diderot, Condorcet, D’Holbach . They applied reason consistently against old hierarchies and institutions, including slavery and colonialism, precisely because they were fetters on human freedom and equality... Indeed, anti-imperialist radicals of the 20th century such as CLR James recognised that Western thought was the wellspring of all progressive, emancipatory politics — especially the historical gains that emerged out of the Enlightenment...   These so-called “western values” are not western in any essential sense. They aren’t the property of white people; they are the birth right of all humanity. Which is why previous anti-imperialist radicals made a distinction between the good that stemmed from the most revolutionary elements of Western culture and the scourge of Western imperialism, which was a major obstacle to the realisation of these ideals around the world.  “The science resulting from all human knowledge has no nationality,” observed Sekou Touré, who lead Guinea to independence: “The ridiculous disputes about the origin of such and such a discovery do not interest us since they add nothing to the value of the discovery.”  Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese nationalist and Pan-Africanist himself, was known to have been inspired by the French revolution in his anti-imperialism, and studied French Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. Moreover, CLR James, while detesting European colonialism, felt no shame in acknowledging the “learning and profound discoveries of Western civilisation” and made it his mission to “master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilisation”. Radical Enlightenment values are still the best tools humanity has crafted to create a better world. The challenge then is not to negate them but to build upon them, expand them, and ultimately raise them to a higher level never before seen. This still remains Africa’s path to liberation from tyranny and want — as opposed to Andrews’ nihilistic vision, which sees no place for interracial solidarity and finds a “glimmer of hope for true transformation” only in total collapse of the system. Dare I suggest it: “western values” are the real path towards black freedom."
Left wingers are obsessed with Revolution

At last, the myth of ‘institutional racism’ is collapsing - "Why are the cultural elites so furious with the review? Because they are so heavily invested in the idea that Britain is an institutionally racist country. They need this myth. They benefit from it. It guarantees funding to their organisations, clout for their spokespeople, influence for those who can claim the mantle of racial victimhood. They see the review — rightly — as a direct challenge to the social and political power they have built on the back of the myth of institutional racism. They loathe Sewell because he has pulled the rug out from under the feet of the powerful identitarian lobby. He has pricked their politics of grievance. He threatens to derail the gravy train. Their fury is driven by naked self-interest disguised as concern about racism.  This is why Sewell is being talked about almost as a heretic. His review’s questioning of the idea of institutional racism is being treated as an act of sacrilege, a sinful assault on orthodoxies carefully nurtured and promoted by identitarian sects. In suggesting that social class is more important than race, this Tory government has done something more radical and destabilising than the moronic new left could ever hope to achieve — it has exposed the hollowness, the divisiveness and the pretensions of the identitarian set, and suggested that economic factors such as class deserve more of society’s attention and resources. ‘Class?! How dare you’, the dumb left says.   ‘Institutional racism’ is in many ways the founding myth of the new elites. It is the source of their moral authority. In depicting Britain as a racist country, they can position themselves as the wise, enlightened ones who must rescue and re-educate us all. Once, the elites viewed us as an underclass in need of moral correction; now they view us as a racist throng requiring unconscious bias training. No wonder they’re so angry today: this review has weakened the already weak foundations of their elitist claims to moral and social authority over the masses. The Emperor of Identitarianism now stands naked before us. And you know what to do: laugh."
On the Sewell report

Decolonizing the Hunt for Dinosaurs and Other Fossils - The New York Times - "Questions about where fossils belong and who is best suited to work on them have sparked sharp controversies in recent years... in 2015, David Martill, a paleobiologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, dismissed questions about his team’s lack of collaboration with Brazilian researchers on a specimen found there. “I mean, do you want me also to have a Black person on the team for ethnicity reasons, and a cripple and a woman, and maybe a homosexual too just for a bit of all round balance?” he said in an interview at the time with Herton Escobar, a Brazilian science journalist.  Dr. Martill said in an interview in December that he chose his words poorly. But he said he remains opposed to laws that dictate where fossils go. In 2020, he was a co-author of a paper on another find exported from Brazil and described without a Brazilian co-author.  “I do not think governments should dictate who works on fossils,” he said. “I think scientists should be able to choose who they work with.” These sorts of controversies are one example of the way the discipline’s colonial history lingers, Ms. Raja-Schoob says. But there are others. Much of global paleontology is still conducted in languages like English, German and French"
This exposes the cynicism of claiming all the archaeological artifacts that happen to be found in your geographical area as your inalienable cultural patrimony that cannot be exported because it's an affront to your culture and reveals it to just be wanting to keep cool stuff

Racist Moments in WWE Catalog Are Missing on Peacock Streaming - The New York Times - "The removal of the segments comes as other streaming services and entertainment companies have sought to give audiences context for older films and television shows that feature offensive content.  Disney’s streaming service includes a 12-second disclaimer that cannot be skipped before films like “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan” that tells viewers they will see “negative depictions” and “mistreatment of people or cultures.” Editors’ Picks Quartz Watches Are Having a Movement In Memoriam: The Musicians We Lost in 2024 Hanukkah in Pictures: Keeping the Flame Alive  “These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” the disclaimer warns. “Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”  This month, Turner Classic Movies showed 18 classic films, including “The Jazz Singer” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” that were preceded by commentary from film experts who prepared viewers for scenes they could find jarring or upsetting.  HBO Max initially removed “Gone With the Wind” from its streaming service, then added it again with a four-minute introduction by the TCM host Jacqueline Stewart, who explains the enduring cultural importance of the film even as it “denies the horrors of slavery as well as its legacies of racial inequality.”  Last June, an NBC spokesman said four episodes of “30 Rock” that featured blackface were being removed from circulation at the request of Tina Fey, the show’s creator, and Robert Carlock, an executive producer and showrunner."

HANSON: The 10 radical new rules that are changing America - "1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much...
2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law...
3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality...
4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and history...
5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. “Noble lies” by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect “Neanderthals” from themselves. Article content  Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing and normative rules of school behaviour. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating and air conditioning.
6) Hypocrisy is passe. Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate change activists fly on private jets. Social justice warriors live in gated communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism and homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. It is what you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live, that matters.
7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it. It is more humane to let thousands of homeless people live, eat, defecate and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill and create sufficient public shelter areas.
8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence...
9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project require any evidence or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs. Undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees reflect credentials, not knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters.
10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter are the new gospels."
From 2021

‘Today’s leftists want to make politics all about themselves’ - "David Swift is a historian and the author of A Left for Itself: Left-Wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism....
A lot of people on the left are not really involved in politics to advance the cause they care about. Instead, it is really about themselves. A lot of people’s politics isn’t so much about what they believe in or how they want the world to be. Instead, it reflects an element of themselves, in the same way that a football fan might appreciate their team or a drum-and-bass fan might appreciate that kind of music. It is actually more like a hobby, a pastime or a form of identity than politics as we normally understand it. And part of this is down to social media... There has been a transition in the past 100 years away from trade unions, feminist groups, black and Asian groups and gay-rights groups all advancing their interests. Now, we have people who aren’t any of these things and aren’t fighting about these issues – instead, they are fighting about things that affect other people. Obviously, this can be a very good and honourable thing. But unfortunately it sometimes lends itself to performative radicalism.   For example, look at the Palestinian cause. That cause is very important. But a lot of British people who are not Muslims or Jews, and who have nothing to do with the Middle East, wonder why the left cares so much about it when there are so many other injustices all around the world.  Another example is trans rights. Obviously, trans people are subject to all kinds of bullying, hostility and violence, and that’s a very serious, important issue. But it’s something that affects so few people – and that is what makes it a perfect issue for this identity leftism... people don’t believe that the economic situation can ever really change. Because the limit of a lot of people’s economic ambition is piecemeal reform, they think they should aim for more achievable goals, such as ones relating to cultural issues."

Meme - Marina @dyingnome: "do you also need to feel attracted to crash bandicoot in order to play the games or is this only important when the protagonist is a woman?"
Pirat Nation @Pirat_Nation: "Whats exactly the target audience?"
Left wingers think an attractive character is one you are attracted to

Bioware Employee, David Crooks, Celebrates And Mocks TotalBiscuit's Death - "TotalBiscuit was a renowned YouTube personality and video game critic whose death is a tremendous loss for the gaming community. However, it seems like not everyone feels that same way and disgustingly a BioWare employee, David Crooks, thought it was a good idea to mock John Peter ‘TotalBiscuit’ Bain in his death.  David Crooks is a BioWare employee who took to Twitter following TotalBiscuit’s passing and began trash-talking him; calling the word ‘a little bit better’ after Bain’s demise.  One would think Crooks would stop there but no, he went on a series of follow-up tweets to further insult the dead"
What "empathy" and "kindness" look like

Meme - "ARE YOU A NAZI? fun and accurate!
ARE YOU WHITE? no -> not a Nazi
DO YOU HATE YOURSELF? (for being white) yes -> NOT A NAZI
No -> congratulations you're a NAZI"

Meme - Jake 🇺🇸 @omni_american: "Faculty at my college conspired, a few days ago, to prevent students from seeing a film about Hamas's sexual violence on Oct 7, even going so far as to lock a door so they couldn't get into the auditorium. This was a straw/camel's back moment for me. I'm coming around to this view:  "Universities should face a choice: Forgo the billions of taxpayer dollars that underwrite their bloated tuitions, politicized bureaucracies, and one-sided intellectual orthodoxies or accept strict conditions of colorblindness, admissions transparency, and political neutrality in every aspect of their operations.""