Links - 1st November 2025 (2)

SAF court system saved me from injustice : r/SingaporeRaw - "ORDed a few days back. Now civilian so I can share my story without fear.  Months back, I was charged with disobedience of general order, insubordination and AWOL. But all charges were dropped. So gotta thank my defending officer and the court who just dropped my charges.  My vocation was ASA. Basically I had a long standing dispute with my ex DXO superior. He had crazy demands that I notify him of my location during camp, outside of camp when I am on MC and also let him check through my phone every week because he says if I get caught by MP command for porn, he will be questioned as well.  7 months ago, while on my way to camp I stepped on drain cover which was loose and I fell in and badly injured myself. Even though I was wearing smart 4, the pants on my knees got torn by a sharp edge and my leg was stabbed as well. So got a big ass deep cut.  Sent to hospital, went through surgery. Stayed in hospital for 10 days and after that got MC for additional 3 weeks. During then I was wheelchair bound & used crutches as well. When I was on MC and at home, he'd ask me to send a selfie of myself outside my house with my unit number showing. Few times a day I had to do it. Not only that I was told to turn on live location on Whatsapp for 24 hours day & he also told me to turn on Google live location and he will check my location history after I get back to camp.  12 days into my MC, the DXO messaged me and told me I need to book into camp to get my MC reviewed and authenticated by the camp MO. That point still in wheelchair & crutches. For yalls information, my camp is on a hill. If you miss the shuttle bus, it'd take at least 30 mins to climb the hill since my unit was at HQ building. And he told me to be at the medical center in 1 hour.  I told him it is physically impossible for me to do it. Told me to take taxi to camp. I told him I'm wheelchair bound and I won't be able to make it up the hill. He told me he's giving me a direct order and I am required to follow it. At that instant, I told him no I won't be able to make it to camp & again sent him a picture of the MC from the hospital stating the period and also the memo from the doctor.  After that I didn't receive any messages from. I would only send him selfie of myself in front of my house door via whatsapp and he would just reply with the thumbs up emoji.  After I got back to camp, the DXO didn't give me much work seeing the condition I was in and also stopped talking to me.  The week after I got back to camp, he & a officer (rank LTC), called me into a private meeting room. They inform me that they are going to be referring me to regimentation & disciplinary department and also MP command for the charges:
1. Disobedience of general order. For refusing to come to camp for medical review when ordered
2. Insubordination. For telling the DXO I will not come to camp and I raised my voice at him over a phone call
3. AWOL. Since I didn't come to camp, I was considered AWOL for those 9 days.
I tried to explain to the LTC in that meeting room that I was wheelchair & crutches bound, how could it be expected for me to appear in camp and I had a valid MC. The LTC said we don't know whether your MC is real or forged. So the camp MO has to authenticate it. And since I didn't turn up, considered AWOL.  Realized there was no point speaking to the LTC, so I had to go up higher the chain. I brought my case to the CO (COL rank) of the HQ to plead my case with him. But it was pointless. He told me I should've followed the orders and I wouldn't be in this state where I am.  I went up higher the chain to meet the camp commander, but even then it was of no use. I was told the same thing. Should learn to deal with my consequences etc and face my summary trial.  Few weeks later, I went for my summary trial and my charges were read out to me. In total, if I accepted the charges I would've been sentenced to 3 weeks in DB. However I didn't accept the charges and I wanted a general court martial.  After that I was assigned a court date & also a defending officer (DO). His rank is MAJ. I went to meet my DO and he questioned me in length, told me to provide screenshots of whatsapp messages, location logs from my Google account my original hospital MC & the doctor's memo from the hospital. He himself was shocked because there was no basis for the case at all. My DO sent all the documents, my written testimony basically all my evidence over to the SAF legal services or prosecution side. I dont remember the actual term.  Close to 2 weeks after my DO sent all the information to the prosecution side, I was informed via my DO that all my charges got withdrawn after thorough investigation by I think MP command. There will be no court date and won't have to go through court martial. So I can return back to camp without any issues  But I didn't want to return back to same unit. I urged my DO to help me get a change. Told me only I can do it to go to PCC who will be able to force a change of unit. The camp MO was well aware of my history and I got a referral back to PCC.  At PCC, I completely broke down & told the psychiatrist MO that if I am in the same unit and under the same DXO, I will off myself. Explained my whole history and was given a immediate transfer to another unit in camp. Luckily the new unit was way different. At least treated NSFs with a bit of decency. Not fully but didn't demand GPS location when I am at home on MC.  I spent my last remaining months recovering & feeling a sense of freedom in the new unit. Made some buddies in the unit & enjoyed.  But honestly, even though I suffered during the majority of NS from BMT at Tekong to getting downpessed to being abused by a DXO, the SAF justice system saved me. My DO is one hell of a person, really went all out helping me and got rid of all the charges.  I know that NSFs will still continue to be abused, but there is a tiny amount of silver lining."

Meme - Sand Snakes: "WE WANT JUSTICE FOR OBERYN. AND THAT'S WHY WE ARE GOING TO... MURDER OBERYN'S BROTHER AND NEPHEW"
Some people still defend the later seasons of Game of Thrones

She was the only character getting off on the end of the world : r/freefolk - "Pretty much all the female leads in S7-8 went this way.  One of GoT's strengths was younger women like Arya, Sansa and Daenerys all developing their own individual strengths in different ways... then suddenly in S7 they all started acting the same way."

She was the only character getting off on the end of the world : r/freefolk - "What did it for me was when Arya a 90 lbs teenage girl decided using a dagger to duel Brienne of Tarth and was parrying Brienne's longsword attacks. Not only does Brienne have more than twice the size and weight of Arya but she also had already defeated two knights who were well respected for their fighting skills in single combat duels (The Flower knight, and the Hound)."
"I hate that people like D and D don’t understand that being an assassin doesn’t make you Batman. Being an assassin especially for someone of Arya’s stature is more about being subtle, poisoning, disguises, agility not actual fighting ability."
"And AFAIK there’s nothing in the books to indicate that even the greatest faceless man to ever live could survive against a mediocre knight in a straight up fight."

@winepoetryorvirtue on Tumblr - "When your dad is your uncle and your aunt is your mum and your girlfriend is your aunt and your grandfather killed your grandfather and your brother is Aegon and so are you"

The Shift has Hit the Fan | Facebook - "Funny how *experts* never called Pride a measles super spreader. But when it’s the Calgary Stampede? Suddenly it’s a national health emergency. The fear factory’s back in business - just depends who’s attending."

Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist on X - "The Texas House passed a bill making it faster for property owners to evict squatters who live on their land without permission. The vote was 85 to 49. 89% of the House Democrats voted AGAINST the bill. It already passed the Senate 21 to 8. It's now on Governor Abbott's desk."

Hunter Ash on X - "Different groups flourish best under different systems.   For high trust people, endless precautions like shampoo locked in cases at CVS and bars on shop windows are needlessly costly. But for low trust people, they’re essential for commerce to function at all. Likewise, Bukele’s heavy-handed policing clearly improved El Salvador but would be an absurd imposition in Denmark.  When you force both groups to live under the same system, either the high trust people have to pay for the cost of security measures that aren’t necessary for their group, or low trust people get away with crimes. Either way, at least one group isn’t living under its optimal system. Probably neither is.  There is no single universal system of government or culture that is best for all groups. People are diverse, and require solutions tailored to their respective natures."

Blacklock's Reporter on X - "“The Fund is working for women entrepreneurs and businesses. It has helped 500 women start new businesses.” — @mary_ng AUDIT: 322 businesses were accepted at cost of $130.3M. All 322 were already in business. “Fund did not go to new businesses for start-up.”"
Dan Albas on X - "I still recall the massive outrage over a $16 glass of orange juice charged to taxpayers by a former CPC Minister, who ultimately resigned. Today the Liberals frequently waste hundreds of millions of dollars and generally total silence. What has changed?"
Double standards are good because Liberals are good and virtuous and Conservatives are evil and venal

NSS reports Islamic radio charity to commission over antisemitism - "Media regulator Ofcom announced this week it has fined Markaz-Al-Huda Limited £3,500 for a programme in which Jews were called "the biggest enemies of humanity".  The NSS reported Markaz-Al-Huda, which says its charitable activities include eradicating "religious and cultural prejudices", to the Charity Commission following the announcement.  Markaz-Al-Huda runs the radio station Salaam BCR. Although the charity surrendered its community radio license, which means it can no longer broadcast on the airwaves, Salaam BCR continues to stream content on its non-licensable online service.  Charities are entitled to extensive tax breaks. They must exist for the public benefit, and must not publish material that "incites hatred on the grounds of race, religion or sexual orientation". On October 17th 2023, days after the Hamas attack on Israel, Salaam BCR broadcast a programme featuring a speech delivered by Islamic scholar Shujauddin Sheikh (pictured). Shujauddin Sheikh leads Tanzeem-e-Islami, an Islamic group in Pakistan with some members linked to militant Islamists.  The speech said Jews are "the biggest enemies of humanity" and accused them of being "envious" of the Islamic prophet Muhammad just as Satan "was envious of the first prophet, Prophet Adam". The speech also said the history of Jews is "from killing prophets to only protecting their own interests, to instigating war, to instigating war and then lending money with interest and strengthening their economy".  Ofcom said these statements "drew upon common antisemitic tropes" and breached the Broadcasting Code regarding hate speech, discriminatory language and abusive or derogatory treatment. It expressed concern that the speech "had the potential to aggravate religious tensions between Muslim people and members of the Jewish community in the UK", and therefore "posed a serious risk of harm to members of the public". When Ofcom published the breach decision last year, Markaz-Al-Huda accused Ofcom of being a "puppet instrument heavily run and supportive of a Zionist agenda which makes [it] a discriminative and Islamophobic organisation". It surrendered its broadcast license as a "gesture of our objection to fairness and disgust".  It also said Ofcom "bows down to Zionist groups controlling all media and regulator and others".  Markaz-Al-Huda demanded to know the identity of the complainant, saying it had a "desire to know how a Zionist sympathiser understood Urdu and called the content antisemitic". It added: "you hide behind data protection to hide your snitches…we have a right to know who and how we have offended"."
Clear Islamophobia. Everyone knew they meant "Zionists"

British Muslim cleric tells boys they can have sex slaves - "A hardline Muslim preacher suspected of radicalising three British jihadis told teenage disciples that it is ‘permissible’ under Islam to have sex slaves.  Ali Hammuda, an Imam at a Cardiff mosque where three young jihadis from the city worshipped before travelling to Syria to join Islamic State, also told the group of boys as young as 13 that the ‘day of judgment is close’ – a key part of IS’s warped propaganda... The cleric’s extraordinary preachings were recorded secretly at a halaqa, or religious study circle, at the Al-Manar mosque by an undercover reporter. The event was publicised by posters mimicking the famous British wartime propaganda slogan, declaring Keep Calm And Come To Halaqa. Fringed by drawings of sports equipment, the poster added: ‘Brothers Only, Ideal age 13-18. Followed by indoor football.’ In the most damning section of the recording, Hammuda, the English Islamic Programmes officer at the mosque, explains a series of Hadiths, or sayings of the Prophet Mohammed with his group. He inserts his own twisted interpretation of a Hadith in which the Prophet says one of the Doomsday signs will be when a slave girl gives birth to her master. He tells them: ‘One of the interpretations as to what this means is that towards the end of time there will be many wars like what we are seeing today, and because of these wars women will be taken as captives, as slaves, yeah, women will be taken as slaves.  ‘And then, er, her master has relations with her because this is permissible in Islam, it’s permissible to have relations with a woman who is your slave or your wife.’  In his rambling address to the boys, Hammuda also stated that another interpretation of the Hadith is that children will come to treat their mothers like slaves. He said: ‘The one I think is strongest is that towards the end of time you will see a lot of Muslims disobeying their mothers and fathers… you see children speaking to their mothers and fathers as if they are your slave.’ At no point does Hammuda, who was born in Palestine but brought up in the UK, point out that slavery is no longer permitted in Islam, nor indeed that it is illegal in the UK.  The hitherto unbroadcast audio tapes, recorded by TV company Hardcash Productions in an investigation into jihadis, were made in October 2014 – only weeks after reports of IS atrocities against the minority Yazidi sect in northern Iraq, whose women were enslaved, raped or executed after being captured by the IS thugs... In other recordings, Hammuda speaks of music being ‘a sickness’ and a ‘tool of Satan’... An undercover reporter, who made the recordings, also found a range of extremist literature available, such as Music Made Me Do It, which describes the harmful social, psychological and physical effects of music on individuals, and Punishment In Islamic Law, which advocates Shariah law, with its punishments of execution, amputation and stoning... The Al-Manar mosque has hosted a series of visiting extremist preachers, including Muhammad Mustafa Al-Muqri, an Al Qaeda ally and ex- leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The mosque has denied links with radicalism.  Until 2013, Hammuda was allowed to hold lunchtime sessions at Cathays High School in Cardiff, where Reyaad Khan was educated. Hammuda told his followers that music is manipulative, and along with ‘free mixing’ between men and women, is ‘not permitted in Islam’.  The revelations come as new Home Office figures show that no fewer than 50 young children were prevented by family court judges from being taken to Syria by their parents in 2015. The official report into the Government’s ‘Contest’ counter-terrorism strategy revealed that more than 150 attempted journeys were disrupted last year."
From 2016
Islamophobia!
Clearly he is ignorant about Islam and needs Karen Armstrong to explain it to him

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "An Islamist group gathers to discuss a plan to Islamize and take over the UK:  “There will come a point where this oppressive rule will end. We do not accept this system we live under, which we will replace with an Islamic system."  How is this even allowed?"

Vivid.🇮🇱 on X - "There are 581 mosques in New York. Why do they pray on the streets?"
Gad Saad on X - "Is there an Islamic city that has 581 synagogues or churches?"

British cutlery company releases square-tipped knives that can't stab people - "The knives in Viners' new four-piece set end in a flat top instead of a sharp point, and have been created in response to rising knife crime statistics and new legislation, which says kitchen knives can be considered an offensive weapon."
Surely this will solve the problem. People are so stupid they don't know how to slash instead

Meme - Black woman: "I'm ignorant and wrong. I'm going to be loud about it too"

Mamdani Did All the Things the Establishment Hates. He Won Anyway. : r/politics - "She won the popular vote against Donald Trump. So many people turned out against him, specifically. I voted for Hillary, doesn’t mean I have any idea what she stood for.  If she had a real message, I would remember a slogan other than “I’m With Her”."
"Same overseas lol  Here in France, everyone heard Obama's 'Yes we can' speech, knew who he was, what he was about.  Hillary? We knew she was a woman, but that was literally it lol. Nobody had any idea what her platform was. Trump was a clown but even then, the general idea was that he was a business man and a political outsider that wanted to MAGA and build a wall. Trump had so much more presence and generally memorable stances, it was unreal. Imagine having less known stances than Trump, the dude that doesn't know jack about shit."

Why do police officers in the US shoot suspects multiple times? : r/NoStupidQuestions - "There is a video from early in the Ukraine Russia war  Russian guy is hiding in an outdoor toilet/shed as 6~ Ukrainian solders are clearing the neighborhood. The Russian jumps out and gets shot several times by the solders weilding rifles within 10 feet of him.  The Russian then started to stand back up.  People who are shot often do not die nearly as quickly as you'd think."
Why do police officers in the US shoot suspects multiple times? : r/NoStupidQuestions - "I feel like hunters have the best idea of how much it actually takes to incapacitate a living being.  They’ll spend much more time waiting on the perfect shot, using much more powerful weapons, using bullets designed for the most lethal effect on that specific animal, and it still won’t be enough sometimes for an animal that weighs less than the average human.  So if you have less time because lives are in danger and you have a less-optimal choice of firearm… Yeah, the best way to ensure a threat is no longer a threat is by shooting them repeatedly."
"Hunter here - this is truth. I've seen deer literally split open from front to back, draging their organs, run for 2 miles, and still need to be shot in the head to be killed. Living things are really good at staying alive and can be incredibly hard to kill."
Why do police officers in the US shoot suspects multiple times? : r/NoStupidQuestions - "One other factor that also gets seldom considered is the fact that, in many of these cases, you have multiple officers all shooting.  They aren’t a hivemind though - as one person, you are conducting an assessment, concluding “oh shit this guy is going about to stab/shoot/whatever me or my colleagues”, then firing until satisfied that the threat is stopped. That might only be, say, 5 rounds, but then you’ve got 4 other officers with guns beside you who are going through the exact same process. You can’t even reliably know how many rounds you fired under that kind of stress, there’s no way you’ll actually be aware of how many everybody else is firing as well.  That’s how you typically end up with some subject being shot like 20 times. It might sound insane, but given the circumstances it actually isn’t outrageous."

Buskers must now sing in French in Quebec City's tourist hub. Not everyone is happy - "According to the city's regulation regarding public entertainers, modified in May, buskers must perform in French or play instrumental at two sites located in Petit Champlain. In an emailed statement, a city spokesperson said these two sites are reserved for French music to "underline the 40th anniversary of Quebec's inclusion on the world heritage cities list."... ince 2017, Birdie Veilleux says the street music scene has steadily declined in Quebec City.  A violinist who grew up in Quebec City and plays with Baker, he says Quebec's capital has become "the most regulated place in the world to play."  He said the rules keep piling up, especially in the Petit Champlain area. Veilleux says some of these changes mean a loss in traffic and income for musicians.Among the 53 remaining busking sites listed in the city, most include a limit on the number of hours a musician can perform per day as well as the number of people in a singular group... Despite the city's thorough audition process, he says the quality of buskers has declined and some career street musicians have called it quits... He says the newest rules in the Petit Champlain regarding French songs are particularly disappointing considering these two sites are in pedestrian-only areas. "It was like the last remaining spot where you could get proper crowds and proper pay," he said. "We were never warned or consulted."  As a francophone Quebecer, he says art should not be restricted in this way.  "I am a separatist, but I still think this rule is ridiculous," he said, adding Quebec City's culture isn't only French.  "Indigenous people that want to sing in their language, they wouldn't even be able to perform," he added."

Document: The Symbolism Survey - "In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?  McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.  His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. More impressive is that seventy-five writers replied—most of them, in earnest. Sixty-five of those responses survive (McAllister lost ten to “a kleptomaniacal friend”). Answers ranged from the secretarial blow off to a thick packet of single-spaced typescript in reply... The answers to the questionnaire were as varied as the writers themselves. Did Isaac Asimov plant symbolism in his work? “Consciously? Heavens, no! Unconsciously? How can one avoid it?” Iris Murdoch sagely advises that “there is much more symbolism in ordinary life than some critics seem to realize.” Ayn Rand wins the prize for concision; addressing McAllister’s example of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter, she wrote, “This is not a definition, it is not true—and, therefore, your questions do not make sense.” Kerouac is a close second; he writes, “Symbolism is alright in ‘Fiction’ but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.” The apologies Bruce received from secretaries—including those of John Steinbeck, Muriel Spark, and Ian Fleming—explaining that they were traveling and unable to respond were longer than that.  Science-fiction writers—most notably Fritz Leiber, Lloyd Biggle Jr., Judith Merril, and A. J. Budrys—were the most expansive. Biggle sent a lengthy letter and then, nearly a year later, sent further thoughts. In the second letter, he advised McAllister to read an essay by Mary McCarthy, “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” saying, “You will not want to do any kind of article on symbolism until you have read [this] … You will find much good material there, as well as an emphatic reinforcement for your viewpoint.” (McCarthy sent the same advice herself.) Judith Merril’s response is heavily mired in linguistics; she offers McAllister a chart to illustrate her semantic overview... “The conclusion I came to was that nobody had asked them. New Criticism was about the scholars and the text; writers were cut out of the equation. Scholars would talk about symbolism in writing, but no one had asked the writers.”"

Meme - "A condom shaking hands with A girlfriend
Spending more time iri my wallet than on my dick"

Customer sets fire to Spanish cafe after it ran out of mayonnaise

How a French exchange student saved our summer (aka "I invited a 13-year-old French girl to stay for the summer. Here’s how it went")

Analyzing Yahoo Personals (2004-2005): White women who describe themselves as slim, slender, athletic, fit or average are 7x more likely to exclude black men than those describing themselves as thick, voluptuous, a few extra pounds, or large. 1.46% of white women declare a preference for black. : r/RacePillScience
Online dating While Minority? You're gonna have a bad time (Feliciano, Robnett, and Komaie, 2008) : r/BlackPillScience - "Among daters with stated racial preferences, white men are more likely to exclude blacks as possible dates, while white women are more likely to exclude Asians... body type has no effect on white women’s exclusion of Asian men... In terms of religion, whites who identified as Jewish were dropped from the analysis of black exclusion because it was a perfect predictor: all white men and women who identified as Jewish and stated racial preferences excluded blacks as possible dates; all Jewish white women with racial preferences also excluded Asian men as possible dates"

Santanu Bhattacharya on X - "Cars these days have too many gadgets. I tried to reverse, and it played a video of somebody getting run over by a car 😂"

The End - "In 1999 my family believed the world was coming to an end.  We were living in central Wisconsin, on the outskirts of a prosperous lake district (my parents noted, more than once, the fortuitous proximity to sources of fresh water), and as the millennium neared, our house became a fortress braced for the apocalypse...   The panic was my parents’ response to the y2k bug, though its roots could be traced to an abiding occupation with biblical prophecy... In the age of “superstorms” and Ready.gov, it is not unusual for people to have a cache of bottled water in their basements, or to casually speculate about fending a hungry mob off their property. As my friends and I hover around the knell of thirty, childless and saddled with debt, we speak about the future with an almost welcome sense of contingency. “If the glaciers haven’t melted,” we say, or “when the singularity occurs,” just as my parents couched every plan in the caveat “if the Lord tarries.”... It is fashionable to dismiss today’s fundamentalism as an evolutionary hangover—a vestige of an ancient, more ignorant era. In reality, it was both a response to and a product of modernity... progress is a weird thing; it has a way of engendering optimism and dysphoria in similar measure... By the advent of the Cold War, preachers faced little difficulty tapping into the angst of an American public terrified at the prospect of nuclear annihilation. “Amid the disjuncture of modern times,” Sutton writes, “apocalypticism often made better sense than competing theologies.”... George W. Bush apparently believed that Iraq and Afghanistan were singled out in end times prophecy. “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” he told French President Jacques Chirac in a 2003 phone call, appealing to their common Christian faith as a basis for the invasion. “This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase His people’s enemies before a new age begins.” Chirac, a Roman Catholic, promptly asked his staff to call the French Federation of Protestants and find out what Bush was talking about... One afternoon my systematic theology professor gave a forty-minute lecture about the perfect alignment between Islamic prophecy and biblical end times chronology, arguing that Osama Bin Laden was the false prophet described in the book of Daniel. Theories of this sort, once unabashedly flaunted by preachers and televangelists, are now increasingly limited to private discussions within the coterie of true believers... But apocalypticism remains a timely subject. After all, we live in an era not unlike the one that incubated modern fundamentalism. Like those who saw Progressivism—with its emphasis on rational, technological solutions—as a panacea for the social and economic strife of the early twentieth century, today some of us hope that Silicon Valley will engineer an earthly utopia. But such cheery visions of the future belie our own fears about the present, as climate change and global terror loom. Progress and panic have always been two sides of the same coin, and if we dismiss the rants of televangelists, or snicker at the megaphone insanity of street preachers, it is at least in part because they embody an unflattering reflection of our own obsession with apocalypse, because their worldview is the most obvious distillation of the modern death wish. Sutton’s book demonstrates that the history of evangelicalism, cynical and fatalistic as it may be, is very much our own"

Cat and World War II Documentaries / Fighting Fascism like in World War II / D-Day Soldiers as Antifa

"No more World War II documentaries for this orange boy 🐱 *cat doing Nazi salute to Hitler*"

Man in present day: "OH GRAMPS ... I WISH THE YOUTH WOULD FIGHT FASCISM AS HARD AS YOU AND THE BOYS DID!"

World War II Soldier in Trench: "WIFE WROTE ME, SOME FUCKING NIGGER MOVED IN NEXT DOOR."
Soldier 2: "WELP, THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD!"

*Brainlet blocks*
"Muh ANseSTurs" - Brainlet wearing Antifa T-shirt putting a square block into a round hole imagining D-Day troops getting ready to storm beach
*2 soyjaks with Pride flag badges, one with a Trans flag shirt, applauding*

Links - 1st November 2025 (1 - Charlie Kirk Assassination: Jimmy Kimmel, Oxford Union)

Meme - Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy: "The PM is embroiled in a sleaze scandal about secret donations. A man just walked free after trying to stab a man for insulting Islam. Our economy is in a doom loop of low growth, high taxes and debt. And the BBC leads with something about a pointless American celebrity."
"Jimmy Kimmel calls out 'anti-American' threats to free speech in tearful TV return"
Adam Adomount @adomount: "What would Labour say if someone started making jokes about murdered MP Jo Cox ? Would Labour be okay about that free speech"

Piers Morgan on X - "So, Kimmel wasn’t cancelled by Trump or the FCC after all - but temporarily suspended by his employer because they thought what he said was ill-timed and insensitive."

Suspect in ABC Station Shooting ‘Politically Motivated,’ Left Note Warning Trump Officials ‘They’re Next’ - "Prosecutors believe the suspect who allegedly opened fire on the ABC10 station in Sacramento on Friday was “politically motivated,” Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho told National Review, explaining that a search of the suspect’s vehicle yielded a note that criticized members of the Trump administration and appeared to reference the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk. The Sacramento Police Department executed a search of 64-year-old Anibal Hernandez Santana’s home, where they not only found the semi-automatic nine millimeter handgun he allegedly used to fire into the station multiple times, but also various pieces of evidence that suggest that he was motivated by anti-Trump animus"
Magills on X - "This guy is going to jail for a decade because Jimmy Kimmel missed three days of work"

Matt Walsh on X - "Kimmel’s show was put on pause for like 3 days and yet leftists will look us dead in the eyes and tell us that this was a greater attack on free speech than shooting and killing Charlie Kirk"

Hillary Clinton on X - "Jimmy Kimmel and other late-night comedians have certainly said things about me that I found offensive, even outrageous. It never crossed my mind to call up the networks and say, "Hey, get rid of this guy." Because that's not how America works. More in my conversation alongside @yarhimilo with the @newyorker ."
Douglass Mackey on X - "Madame Secretary: It crossed your mind to call up Sen. Klobuchar, the FBI and the DOJ and have me arrested for a humorous meme about your campaign. You then celebrated my unlawful and wrongful conviction, which was later overturned by a federal appeals court. Sit down."

Michael Malice on X - "Whats amazing is how brazenly the narrative is being put fwd that Jimmy Kimmel got suspended for a joke as opposed to lying about a murder and refusing to apologize for lying about a murder."

Pop Crave on X - "Elizabeth Warren and three other Democratic lawmakers have launched an investigation into Nexstar and Sinclair, two major TV station owners that are refusing to air Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show."
Bonchie on X - "Wait, don't affiliates have a First Amendment right to broadcast what they want? Are we already back to the left demanding they control the flow of information?"

Meme - Steve @SteveLovesAmmo: "Let's see if a spoon of mine can get more than 126,000 views... Which would be higher than Jimmy Kimmel's ratings." *1.7 million views*

Alex Christy on X - "Jake Tapper and Seth Meyers applaud Kimmel's return with Tapper saying, "it was pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I've seen in my lifetime" and ", I don't know why Disney and Bob Iger ultimately made the right decision and stood for free speech. They didn't initially. And that would be the second example. Because we all saw what happened with our friend Stephen Colbert and Shari Redstone at Paramount with a different merger and a different pressure point that the government has. And we'll see what happens when they come for Comcast and we'll what happens when they come for Warner Brothers Discovery, and maybe you and I will be drawing comic books together.""
Stephen L. Miller on X - "It was just released that Google was pressured by the Biden administration to remove YouTube accounts. But go off @jaketapper"

Oxford Union president-elect must resign over Charlie Kirk messages, say former leaders - "Dozens of former Oxford Union leaders have called for the president-elect’s resignation over messages he sent praising the shooting of Charlie Kirk... The letter has been signed by 26 former Oxford Union presidents, including Rupert Soames, the chairman of the Confederation of British Industry, and Damian Green, the former Conservative MP and Work and Pensions Secretary. More than 40 other ex-Oxford Union officials have added their signatures to the letter. They stated that despite holding views “across the political spectrum”, it was “united in one exhortation”: for Mr Abaraonye to resign... “The attack on Mr Kirk was an attack on the purpose, mission, and role of the Oxford Union,” they said. “It is untenable for our society to have a president who shows either no understanding or blatant disregard for that mission. The issue here is not with politics, but with principle.”"

Chloe Dobbs on X - "George Abaraonye, in his tantrum statement after losing the Oxford Union no confidence vote, says “we EQUIVOCALLY deny” rather than “we unequivocally deny”. That’s ABB for you! This comes after he said in a previous statement that his words were “no less insensitive” than Charlie Kirk’s. I think he meant “no more insensitive”! ABB"

Good riddance (or not) to George Abaraonye | The Spectator Australia - "The ballot question was: ‘Should George Abaraonye, President-Elect, be removed as an Officer of the Society?’ The franchise wasn’t limited to current students or those in the environs of Oxford who could conveniently vote in person, but was extended extraordinarily to potentially thousands of life members all over the world who could vote by proxy. This was at the request of the standing committee – at quite short notice – and has been the cause of considerable confusion and chronic delay. The problem was that life members do not all have membership cards (these do get lost over the decades) and so were permitted either to vote in person with photo ID, or email proof of ID with matriculation details to the single extraordinary returning officer (to whom I shall return). Still, many alumni who live in or around Oxford and who went along to the Goodman Library to vote in person were turned away because their past memberships couldn’t be corroborated manually from central ledgers. Those who were turned away included Baroness Deech (a former head of house), Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, and former presidents of the Union Viscount Hailsham and Melanie Johnson (despite photographic evidence adorning the walls). Scores of others were similarly prevented from voting on account of lost records. Shambolic. Abaraonye’s supporters have been challenging every proxy vote cast by email to ascertain whether the senders were ever members. It is of course perfectly reasonable to seek to prevent electoral fraud, but cross-checking a thousand votes can take some time given that dusty ledgers from the 1960s and 1970s seem to have disappeared altogether. The standing committee knew this and should have foreseen the chaos it might cause. The validity of the vote has been further undermined by unconfirmed reports that the extraordinary returning officer gave other students – some distinctly partisan in the proceedings – access to his email inbox. There was no way of knowing if proxy votes were tampered with, deleted or even received... This whole sorry saga is such an Oxford farrago. Perhaps we could have read the runes when email signatories to the motion of no confidence discovered they had to copy in Abaraonye as the mover of the motion, conveniently providing him with a database of a couple of hundred names and contact details of those who wanted to oust him. His supporters have also been able to see the names of those who voted by proxy, including influential public figures, thus breaching the secret ballot. Since news circulated of his moment of ecstasy at the shooting of Charlie Kirk last month, Abaraonye has been trying to redeem himself with exculpatory excuses. His celebratory comments on Instagram and WhatsApp were ‘poor judgment’, he ‘reacted impulsively’, his words have been widely ‘misrepresented’. He also said that his remarks (‘Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f***ing go’; ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool’) ‘did not reflect my values’ – which is strange because the impulsive reaction is usually a rather accurate reflection of a person’s values. He even claims to have become a victim of ‘cancel culture’, which is also odd given that he was the mover of the motion and so cancelled himself. Toby Young was of the view that Abaraonye ‘should not be penalised by the Oxford Union or the university for saying something offensive but perfectly lawful. That’s free speech’. I agree that he shouldn’t be disciplined by his college or the university, but the Oxford Union has every right to expect elected officers to uphold its institutional ethos. It is indeed a bastion of free speech, and Abaraonye is perfectly free to express his views. But he does not then have the right to hold the office of president if he believes, as it appears to me, that political assassination and violent revolution are justified when the ballot box and free speech are deemed to have failed. It may be ‘perfectly lawful’ to express such a view, but it would rightly disqualify him from holding a number of positions in public life, including, I believe, one that seeks to advance education through free speech and expression. He has damaged the interests of the Oxford Union and brought it into disrepute. Free speech can have perfectly justifiable consequences, and 1,227 members evidently agree with me. Some of Abaraonye’s allies have been framing the attempt to remove him as ‘racist’. According to the Oxford branch of Stand Up To Racism: ‘If this racist campaign to depose George is successful it will further embolden fascists and the far right.’ I’d say that’s a good example of what I call ‘censory smearing’: tarnishing Abaraonye’s critics with unpleasant character smears to shut them down. But I’m not going to be shamed into doubting motives or thinking that the desire for Abaraonye to be removed as president-elect was based on anything but a concern for the reputation and standing of the society. As for ‘racism’, it is worth noting in passing that another screenshot from one of Abaraonye’s WhatsApp exchanges shows him boasting: ‘I don’t frequent white establishments.’ But perhaps those words don’t reflect his values either... He doesn’t even seem to appreciate that when you are an elected officer of a world-renowned debating society that prizes freedom of speech, your own free speech is necessarily constrained by institutional obligations and reputational demands. If you don’t like that, at least try to learn why you shouldn’t stand for a public-facing office."

The Oxford Union is strangely changed - "It’s the fact that they had met that I struggle with. For George Abaraonye, the president-elect of the Oxford Union, Charlie Kirk was not an abstraction, not a monster concocted by Left-wing TikTok feeds. He was a flesh-and-blood man who had bothered to fly across the Atlantic to engage members of the world’s most prestigious debating society in a civil and civilised conversation... How did such a man get elected in the footsteps of WE Gladstone and Benazir Bhutto? How did someone so close-minded get to Oxford in the first place? Abaraonye’s A-level grades were reportedly A,B,B – well below the normal entry requirements for his course. He is, of course, only one student: but one does note that Oxford and Cambridge have, for the first time, dropped out of the top three places in The Times university rankings. The shocking thing is that Abaraonye is, indeed, not an aberration. The Union has seen a series of candidates elected on grounds of identity politics over the past five years. Abaraonye’s bad luck was to go in for performative wokery just as the mood outside turned, just as commentators stopped indulging the lunacies they had put up with since the BLM summer of 2020. The Union’s George Floyd moment had come a year earlier, when Ebenezer Azamati, a Ghanaian student, was physically removed from the chamber. Azamati, who is blind, had arrived to find the debating hall full. Someone had offered him a seat, unaware that it was reserved for the teller. When a security guard asked him to move, he became angry and, after a scuffle, was manhandled out. It was, in a smaller way, a foretaste of what was to happen in Minneapolis the following year. The footage was shocking. Anyone seeing a blind man being dragged from his chair, will feel outrage on his behalf. Amid the indignation, it seemed somehow inadequate to say that Azamati was the victim of an unfortunate misunderstanding or of an over-zealous security guard. No, he had to be a victim of institutional racism, and the Union as a whole needed to atone (as well as pay compensation). Two things have happened since then. First, there has been an increase in the number of officials with various kinds of outreach, inclusion and anti-racist roles. Second, it appears to have become an unwritten rule that, to be elected to an Oxford Union post, you need protected characteristics. All this has happened against the background of rapid change within the university. There are proportionately many more post-graduates, often international students on one-year courses. The change in the membership of the Union has been more radical still, because students at the Saïd Business School, 97 per cent of whom are from overseas, get automatic membership as part of their fees. That deal brings much-needed revenue to the Union which, largely as a result of recent internal shenanigans, is not financially healthy. But it also skews the electorate towards people who are passing through, and who feel little attachment to, let alone reverence for, 200-year-old British institutions. Does that sound exaggerated? Are candidates really putting themselves forward for election to a society that they despise? And winning? Yes. In the current “decolonise” mood, it has become quite normal. Judge for yourself. On Thursday, the following exchange was revealed between Abaraonye and one of his friends. “if u hate it then you should run for presidency!!!” says the other student. Abaraonye replies “real lol that’s what I did”. In fact, the Union has always been politically and, by the standards of its time, ethnically diverse. Off the top of my head, the Left-wing Sri Lankan leader, SWRD Bandaranaike, was an officer in 1923, and James Cameron Tudor, the founder of the Barbadian Democratic Labour Party, in 1942. Theirs are among numerous non-white faces in the photographs on the walls. Of course, if you are determined to bring down the patriarchy, none of this will register with you. There was a neat illustration of this thinking the term before last, when wrangles over a proposed rule-change held up the start of a scheduled debate by two hours, prompting one of the speakers – the then 91-year-old Lord Heseltine, himself president in 1954 – to walk out. There had been hopes that Hezza might remember the society in his will. What mattered so much that it was worth insulting him in such a way? According to that term’s president, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy, “The changes being introduced are long overdue. A fairer, more inclusive system allows students from non-traditional backgrounds to succeed at the Union”. That term, not a single officer or officer-elect was white. The following term – the one just ended – all four elected officers were Pakistani nationals... The danger, indeed, is the opposite: that it becomes obsessed with foreign quarrels, above all, that in Palestine. A debate in Osman-Mowafy’s term, “This House believes that Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide”, brought forth support for Hamas so aggressive that it is being investigated by the police."
Clearly, Abaraonye's comment on hating the Oxford Union has been taken out of context and he's a victim of racism

Meltdown at the Oxford Union - "Harold Macmillan once described the Oxford Union as ‘the last bastion of free speech’. Perhaps this remark made sense when it was uttered back in the 1960s, but it reads today more like a mordant quip. The recent furore over George Abaraonye, the president elect, has all but obliterated the union’s credibility. Everything we know about Abaraonye tells us that he is profoundly unqualified to lead such an institution. He openly celebrated the shooting of Charlie Kirk, posting on his Instagram account: ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool’. In a WhatsApp group, he wrote: ‘Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s fucking go’, ‘Scoreboard FM’ and ‘It really writes itself, doesn’t it’ in response to a fellow student’s comment that ‘He was pro guns LMFAO’. This was in spite of the fact that Abaraonye had met Kirk in person only a few months previously, shaken his hand, and debated him in the chamber. Such musteline behaviour tells us that this is not a man of strong character, but more objectionable still are his attempts at back-pedalling. Abaraonye might at least have acknowledged that it was a hot-headed moment in which he was childishly attempting to be edgy for his friends. But unable to muster the courage to take responsibility for his own words, he instead attempted to blame the victim, saying that his reaction was ‘shaped by the context of Mr Kirk’s own rhetoric’ and ‘My words were no less insensitive than his – arguably less so’. Abaraonye has claimed that he has been on the receiving end of racist abuse and threats. I don’t doubt it. Any story that trends online to this extent will attract its share of trolls who have nothing but bile to add to the conversation. But Abaraonye should also be mature enough to acknowledge that the vast majority of his detractors are not in the least part motivated by racism and would be just as critical had the president elect been white... Abaraonye issued the following statement: ‘This is a chance for us to stand against the racism of the far right, and to stand up for the principles the Union has championed for 200 years. Two centuries later, the same people who claim to believe in the Union are now acting in stark opposition to the Union’s founding principles, by supporting a campaign of harassment, censorship and abuse. We will not be silenced.’ This attempt to position himself as a martyr confirms that he was never fit to be president of the Union. It is purest DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender). In celebrating the murder of his political opponent, it is quite clearly Abaraonye who has acted ‘in stark opposition to the Union’s founding principles’. Nobody is justifying any of the abuse he has been subjected to, all of which must be condemned, but to take these outliers as somehow representative of his critics is dishonest in the extreme. The drama hasn’t ended there. Abaraonye evidently believed that he could mobilise his supporters to win the no confidence vote, but he had not anticipated that it would be opened up to life members. The Spectator has reported that Abaraonye and his supporters then ‘moved a revenge motion of no confidence in the current president, Moosa Harraj, for allowing alumni to vote on Saturday’. Worse still, there have been allegations that the returning officer was subjected to intimidation and so the voting process was temporarily suspended. In spite of these plot twists, the final result was conclusive... inevitably he is now contesting the result. He simply cannot accept that his conduct has undermined his legitimacy as president of the Oxford Union. He would apparently much rather hold firm to the delusional belief that this is a plot by the ‘far right’. The entitlement is off the scale. As I have argued previously, it is simply unfeasible for a man who delights in the assassination of his political opponents to lead an organisation whose entire existence is predicated on the sanctity of free speech. Irrespective of the blindingly obvious incompatibility – somewhat akin to Ayatollah Khamenei taking charge of a synagogue – the Union has seen six-figure donations from alumni put on hold, and dozens of speakers cancelling their forthcoming appearances. This is simply not sustainable. Abaraonye’s narcissistic inability to reflect on his own poor judgement is one thing, but perhaps the more pressing question is why such an individual would be lauded by his peers and elevated to such a prominent position in the first place. This entire carnival adds credence to the view that the prestigious institutions of higher education have become corrupted. Many students have succumbed to an ideological obsession with group identity over academic standards, an infantile conviction that ‘words are violence’, and are determined to live in an atmosphere of strict viewpoint conformity. In such circumstances, perhaps the very notion of a renowned debating chamber that exists to promote the marketplace of ideas has become obsolete. If the Oxford Union was once ‘the last bastion of free speech,’ its ramparts now seem to have crumbled beyond repair."
"Minorities" can do no wrong and holding them accountable is bigotry. All their actions are justified because the violence of the Oppressed is Resistance and is morally good, and is not the same as violence of the Oppressor

Oxford Union in fresh turmoil after second no-confidence vote - "a motion of no confidence against Moosa Harraj, the union’s current president, had failed... “This poll of no confidence is a vengeful counterattack in response to the vote of no confidence against Mr Abaraonye – a vote he brought against himself”, Mr Harraj said in an Instagram post on Wednesday. “It is spiteful and retaliatory”. Mr Harraj, an economics master’s student, also accused his opponents of peddling “racist tropes” to “bring the institution down”."

The saga of the Oxford Union president-elect has just reached a sinister level - "Threats of refusal of invitations by potential speakers and the withholding of significant funding by donors have clearly been taken seriously. It would have been interesting to let things play out naturally, and to see what happened, and how, but it seems that the risk was considered too great. “The adults had to step in,” wrote Daniel Hannan on X. Inevitably that sentiment caused a stir elsewhere. One of Lord Hannan’s followers – “cat mum/abortion is healthcare/trans ally” – made the mistake of pronouncing that it was a “pretty vile” stitch up by “people who do t [sic] actually attend the university”, and was very quickly put right on the concept of membership organisations and how they work."
Clearly speakers and donors are only withdrawing because of racism

Adrian Hilton on X - "🔴Oxford Union, Act III. Having brought allegations and complaints about the integrity of the procedure and count of the no confidence poll, the result is now pending and George Abaraonye remains President-Elect. Apart from being utterly graceless, he has no sense at all of the damage he has done and is doing to the standing and reputation of the Society. To rejoice in the murder of Charlie Kirk was one thing (from which he says he has learned); but to put ego and ambition above the honour and integrity of the Union is just vanity. He has learned nothing."

Oxford Union facing financial crisis over Charlie Kirk scandal - "The Oxford Union’s freshers week stall also recruited around half the number of students it has in recent years, one official claimed."

I was once Oxford Union president. I no longer recognise what it has become - "I resigned as secretary of the trust that owns the Union’s buildings, over comments made by the President-Elect that gloried in the shooting of Charlie Kirk on an American campus. For some years, free speech has been a cause celebre of the Right. I have even written a piece in The Telegraph defending it, in the context of an attempt by students to cancel a controversial speaker at the Oxford Union. Some will therefore accuse me of hypocrisy in calling for George Abaraonye, the President-Elect, to be removed from his position. This is the wrong reading, however. I do not think Mr Abaraonye should be punished by the law for expressing his horrible views; I do not even think he should be sent down from university. But the right to free assembly is every bit as important as free expression; indeed in some ways it is the same thing. A private organisation has the right to order its affairs as it wishes, and should be free to remove those who contravene rules or customs. The ability of institutions to self-govern in accordance with societal norms is crucial to them maintaining respect and relevance, and keeping the state from meddling in its affairs. An institution as well-known and newsworthy as the Oxford Union has a responsibility to do just this. Allowing someone who has praised “violent retaliation” and appeared to make comments mocking the shooting of a man (someone he himself stood across in the Union just months ago) who engaged in public discourse, to remain as head of the world’s most prestigious debating society, is not acceptable. You would not suffer the head of a cancer charity to be rooting for the tumours. Further, my right to write this, and try to encourage the President-Elect to resign, is also part of the process by which society tries to regulate its affairs. Given that, at the time of writing this, this man has rowed back his non-apology, telling the New Statesman that “My words were no less insensitive than [Kirk’s]—arguably less so” – it seems that I am justified in my efforts to further force his removal. But this kind of institutional capture, by those who dismiss their inherent value, is a much broader and more concerning trend than just this student debating society. Just as the socialist Left has learned to take over institutions (the Church of England and the BBC spring to mind) and the Muslim Brotherhood have taught how to gain influence for Islamist ideas via the same mechanism, so too are new radicals using both our institutions and our freedoms against us. As I said in my resignation letter, radical groupings “merely wear our precious freedoms as a costume until they can use them to attack that which is sacred to us.” You believe in freedom of assembly, don’t you? So you cannot object to Gaza marches spewing hate clogging our streets every Saturday. You believe in free speech? So you must allow someone justifying “violent retaliation” and glorying in assassination to remain President of a debate club. You believe in democracy? So you must allow for recent arrivals to vote en masse for Members of Parliament who care exclusively about Palestine and similar causes. I feel bitterly bad about leaving the trustees in the lurch, but it is becoming existential for guardians of civil society to realise that we have allowed the old world of shared norms and institutions to wither; if we aren’t radical in reasserting those time-honoured customs, they will be lost to those who don’t even care. At least Mr Abaraonye is honest about this. He said (in a debate in the Union, of course): “To effectively create change in the world we desire… at times there is simply nothing else that can be required other than violent retaliation. And this is a view I wholeheartedly agree with: the view that some institutions are too broken, too oppressive to be reformed. Like cancers of our society, they must, and they should be taken down by any means necessary.” We have been conditioned into learned helplessness by being told there is nothing we can do in a Left-liberal society to conserve those institutions we care about. It is time for us to reject this notion. As Charlie Kirk would say, we are at a turning point. We must choose the right direction."
How ignorant. Doesn't he know that Democracy is only to push the left wing agenda?

Ousted Oxford Union President-Elect George Abaraonye Could Learn from Frank Meyer - "Bizarrely, Abaraonye depicted the campaign to remove him from office as one of “harassment, censorship, and abuse.” Without a hint of self-irony, the young man who indecently cheered Kirk’s murder wrote: “We will not be silenced.” This past May, Kirk and Abaraonye had met in the Oxford Union. They debated the question of toxic masculinity. Kirk looked and sounded like the Oxford product and Abaraonye looked—in sweatpants, a t-shirt, and what resembled slippers—and sounded like the guy who had never gone to college, rather than the reverse. Though both men were respectful, Kirk clearly won the exchange. One needn’t even watch the 12-minute, 25-second discussion (it starts at 1:06:36) to know this. No one winning a fight bites the other man’s ear, and no one who triumphed in a debate celebrates the murder of his opponent... Abaraonye’s intolerant ilk have dominated the campuses—including Oxford—for the past century or so. I just published a book about one such Oxonian, called The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Like Abaraonye, Frank Meyer joined the Oxford Union, majored in politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE), and depicted himself as a free-speech martyr as he showed contempt for the free expression of others. Meyer, dubbed “the founder” of Great Britain’s student Communist movement in declassified MI5 files, entered Oxford with zero Communists within the student body. He left boasting 300 members of the explicitly Communist October Club that he had started. When George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party (and Angela Lansbury’s grandfather) spoke at Oxford in 1932, his sponsors had to eject a shouting Meyer from the lecture hall. That year, the October Club invited H. G. Wells to campus months after his “liberal fascism” speech that partly criticized Communism. Meyer shouted Wells down, too. In 1933, conservatives blamed Meyer’s groups for the Oxford Union’s passage of the infamous King and Country Pledge, in which the body vowed not to fight for England. In truth, a socialist had introduced the measure. But Meyer’s group had disrupted an Armistice Day gathering of veterans, and MI5 recognized him as the leader of Communist student antiwar efforts. As a graduate student at the London School of Economics, Meyer conspired with Krishna Menon, later one of the most powerful men in India, to rig a vote that elected him president of the student government. After the authorities finally deported Meyer (by then, like Abaraonye, a cause célèbre stripped of his presidency) in June 1934, he showed the emptiness of his activism by going to work directly for future East German dictator Walter Ulbricht, a Communist who had already ordered murders and later ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall, on “peace” efforts in Paris. The obvious parallels between the campus extremists in Britain of the 2020s with those of the 1930s are that both claimed to support peace even as they cheered violence, both defended their own free-speech rights as they worked to strip them from others, and both refused to recognize elections that did not go their way. But a deeper lesson can be drawn—and Charlie Kirk may have understood this better than anyone—that points to the human capacity for change. Frank Meyer acted in an even more obnoxious manner during the 1930s at Oxford than George Abaraonye does now. Yet he eventually asked the bravest question: What if I’m wrong? By 1949, he was serving as a star witness in, to that point, the longest, most expensive trial in U.S. history, which sent 11 former comrades to prison for Smith Act violations. He helped found the American Conservative Union, the Conservative Party of New York, and the Philadelphia Society. His book, In Defense of Freedom, served as a canonical text for the postwar right. Joan Didion credited him, when he was National Review’s literary editor, as the first to take a chance on her freelance work. Kirk debated Abaraonye and thousands of other students who not only disagreed with him but despised him. He did so because he believed in the power of persuasion. Epiphanies happen. Second thoughts birth second acts. Kirk’s Christianity dictated that he treat others as he would be treated. The political animal in Kirk understood that behaving humanely toward ideological adversaries makes it easier for them to embrace your position."

Links - 31st October 2025 (2 - Women)

I've manipulated my husband by strategically sleeping with him for more than 20 years : r/confessions - "I've been married for going on 30 years. Many, many years ago I realized that on the weekends if I got up in the morning and did whatever I needed to do (made breakfast, took care of kids, cleaned, etc) my husband would just stay in bed all day and watch TV. If I wanted to take the kids somewhere, or suggested we go shopping or hiking or hang out with friends or literally anything, my husband would say he's worked hard all week and he wants to just relax, so we'd do nothing all weekend long. BUT if I started the morning by sleeping with him, shortly after we were done he'd get up and take a shower and be ready to go conquer the world.  So if I want to have a lazy day at home, I get up and do whatever I want. But if I want to go do something, I sleep with him first thing in the morning. I know I'm intentionally manipulating him, and I don't actually care because I feel like he's getting what he wants, and so am I."

War Shatters Dating Scene for Women in Ukraine - The New York Times - "While the pursuit of love might seem secondary to dealing with missile attacks, power outages and food shortages, many Ukrainians say they need romantic relationships to help them cope with the trauma of living in a nation at war. For women, the problem is particularly acute. Tens of thousands of men have died. Many more are on the front lines, some have fled the country and others are reluctant to leave their homes, fearful of being stopped in the street by draft officers. In cities like Kyiv, the capital, the presence of men has noticeably dwindled. In some villages, conscription has hollowed out the male population. “This leaves a small percentage of men who are ready for and want relationships,” said Margarita Stelmashova, a Ukrainian psychotherapist and sexologist. The war has also made forming long-term relationships more challenging. Many soldiers experience psychological stress that strains their intimate connections, sexologists say. And several women said in interviews that they worried about dating servicemen who might have war trauma, and who could one day be killed... Faced with the turmoil of the war, some women are now resorting to measures they had not contemplated before, like using dating apps or going on speed dates... Several Ukrainian women who have traveled abroad since the war broke out said it was much easier to date foreigners who did not face the threat of war. Ms. Bairachna, who often travels outside Ukraine, said she had been struck by the dual reality. “Why do our men have to suffer so much when women can just go abroad and have a martini in Milan?” she asked... At Forsage, a popular club in Kyiv, the dance floor pulsed with young people grooving to R&B and pop music. Maryna Pylcha, 22, said there was hardly a night when she was not approached by a man at the club, adding, however, that she was “very selective in this matter.”"
Men die in war. Women most affected.
When female hypergamy still is working in wartime

How women became ‘too eligible’ to date - "according to one study; women now outnumber men in higher education in nearly all OECD countries. Although women’s achievements are cause for celebration, they have also led to big potential issues in the realm of romance... Alongside this disparity, there has been a rise in assortative mating – people tending to want to only date others who have a similar education level to themselves, particularly when it comes to holding a degree. It’s little wonder, then, that educated women have expressed dissatisfaction with their romantic options. A 2023 piece of research from the US’s Institute for Family Studies (IFS) found that 45 per cent of college-educated single women said their relationship status was due to an inability to find someone who met their expectations. Of six different reasons single women gave for why they were not dating or in a relationship, the inability to find partners who measured up was cited most often. Women were also much more discerning than men when it came to dating – far more likely to say a partner’s political views, personal habits and current financial situation were important considerations... “Scholarly research on sex ratios showed that when men are in undersupply (or women in oversupply, depending upon your perspective), the dating culture becomes less monogamous and women are more likely to be treated as sex objects. And that was exactly what was happening.” Date-onomics theorised that the imbalanced sex ratios among college graduates were largely to blame for the rise of hookup culture. Because the “man deficit” gets worse for women and better for men with age, “a single 40-year-old guy who has a good job, who’s decent looking, and who’s able to carry on a normal conversation will have a lot of romantic options,” adds Birger. “And those options are, unfortunately, incentivising him to behave badly.”... while there was an issue with women not wanting to “settle”, there was concurrently an issue with men not wanting to “settle down”... One solution is for societies to become more open-minded about disassortative mating (pairing up with people unlike ourselves). For centuries, the social norm has been what’s called “hypergamy”– the term for women marrying “up”, ie, partnering with men of higher education, career, wealth and/or age. But with men more frequently falling out of higher education and labour markets, that structure no longer works, creating a dynamic where the pool of “suitable” men is far too small to cater for the number of accomplished women. Already, the numbers show that this trend is shifting. Now, for the first time in history, “hypogamy” is on the rise, and women are more likely to marry a less-educated man than men are to marry a less-educated woman than themselves... One study found that, while online dating led to more dates than meeting someone IRL, it led to fewer marriages. Meanwhile, breakup rates for both married and non-married couples were higher for those who met online rather than offline. “Match Group and Bumble do not make money off happily-ever-afters,” as Birger puts it. “They are media companies that make money from subscriptions and advertising.” His top suggestion is to get off the apps and ask someone out whom you already know and like in real life. The other big change to balance the dating scales would be for men and women to regain an education equilibrium, and this means improving academic success rates for boys. Neuroscience has suggested that girls’ brains mature at a faster rate than boys’, which helps to explain why they tend to do better in school. One long-term but radical solution, first proposed by Dr Leonard Sax, author of Boys Adrift, is to delay boys from starting school for a year; studies have shown that boys who are held back or start school later are more likely to attend college. The other big change to balance the dating scales would be for men and women to regain an education equilibrium, and this means improving academic success rates for boys. Neuroscience has suggested that girls’ brains mature at a faster rate than boys’, which helps to explain why they tend to do better in school. One long-term but radical solution, first proposed by Dr Leonard Sax, author of Boys Adrift, is to delay boys from starting school for a year; studies have shown that boys who are held back or start school later are more likely to attend college."
Fussy men need to be realistic and stop being entitled incels infected with toxic masculinity. But it's good for women to have impossibly high standards and men's fault if they can't measure up
Too bad if you suggest men and women's brains are different, that's neuro-sexism and a way to excuse male misbehavior and push responsibility onto women

Dayscar on X - "We need to break the cycle of young men thinking that they need to be accomplished versions of themselves just to date women who barely have a plan for their own lives."

Khiroptera - "fun fact if your breasts are somewhere between a 36C-36D then they weight about the same as your brain. if you're above a D-cup you've probably got more boob than brain"

WNBA star’s wig falls off mid-game, causing chaos on court - "In perhaps the rarest sight in the history of basketball, a game between the Washington Mystics and Phoenix Mercury was halted after a player lost her wig during a play.  During the third quarter of Sunday’s game in Washington, Phoenix all-star Kahleah Copper was attempting to get open on an inbound play by running around a screen set by a teammate. But just as she got loose from her defender, her wig came off and hit the floor – much to the bewilderment of players, referees, fans and commentators alike.

Meme - ""Real men don't care about a womans past" Only said by a woman with a dark past"

Meme - "I think the "6ft" height standard in the U.S is doing a lot more harm than we think.
I think it's genuinely the a huge reason for a lot of resentment we see from young American men today, leading to anti-women sentiments and right wing support politically. I think this specific standard has lead men to feel systematically rejected from dating beauty standards without being able to even attempt to attain them. I don't believe there's any other standard which is as detrimental to either men or women, due to height being an immediately visible trait that has no possibility for change. With 85% of U.S men being under I think it lends men to the belief that even if women do not explicitly state that they want a taller men, men know that if they don't have those golden few inches of bone in their calves, then they are inherently being "settled" for, as the dialogue about height is very commonly seen to be around 6 feet tall."

Meme - Olkenlas @Olivierakenalas: "Equity bank married manager impregnated three of his female staff. Fear men"
Geromac Pro @GeromacPro: "3 equity bank female staff dating their married bank manager got pregnant. Stop making it look like only men are guilty"
Byrd L Robert: "3 Equity Bank female staff who competed for promotion end up pregnant"

Ku Klux Keko on X - "Women have a justification for every, and any, bad behavior a woman engages in. That shit is annoying and makes people less likely to empathize with women in situations that actually warrant empathy."

Meme - "Men before and after taking bath *haggard to handsome*
Women before and after taking bath *pretty to plain*"

Meme - "The girl I been talking to just texted that she just wants to be friends"
"Text her back "Im glad you said it first. ! didn't want to hurt your feelings" give her back those self confidence problems"

Meme - ""anime girls have the most unrealistic bodies with the biggest boobs"
Anime G Cups. Real Life G Cups"

Yxm¡ on X - "Women openly rejecting broke men has never been a problem. But now stable men express their preference for virgins, the same women suddenly take offense. Make it make sense."

Cleopatra | Seduce Her 💋 on X - "93% of women claim that their ex was narcissistic But studies suggest that only about 7% of men are actually narcissistic The math ain’t mathing."

Invis🧜‍♀️ on X - "men call women easy but i ain't ever met a man that was hard to get with"
When you don't understand that men are easy by default, so calling them easy is meaningless

Arslan on X - "Hear me out: Men’s only gym:
- you won’t get called a creep on TikTok
- cable machine won’t be used for kickbacks
- assisted dip machine wont be used for leg press
- no random boners
- squat rack not set on the lowest position
- more compliments and less “I have a bf”"

Meme - Joey Swoll: "And she blocked me."
roseontheinternet: "Was emotional intelligence a banned topic for men when they were in school?"
joeyswoll: "Men go through a lot with no one to turn to because the world beats it into us that we have to be strong and being strong means being silent or we're weak. In fact, a man's biggest cry for help is when he completely shuts down, no tears, no feelings, just emptiness in his eyes zoning out constantly always silent except to say, "I'm fine". Maybe if you genuinely cared to try and help men to be emotionally intelligent instead of belittling us with rage bait for likes on social media. we would be."

Thread by @wil_da_beast630 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Men can and should simply respond to sexless relationships, extreme distrust like this, etc etc simply by saying: "This is not acceptable - we are just friends now."  You should try talking through things 1st, and you'll often be begged to come back if you do this - and can choose to. But simply being willing to say "I am NOT a toxically empathic person: at some level of bullshit, I will simply take my resources/protection/etc and go" will grrrrrreeeeaaattttly improve your life as a man.
"Does this apply to WOMEN too, BRO?!!"
Well, yeah - of course. But, there are reasons I'm making the point specifically to men, today. In the post-feminist era, any woman asking whether she should leave a guy who (say) never made her cum and demanded total access to her devices would be told "YASS, QUEEN!!!" by almost literally 100% of other women. I once tested this on Reddit, and discussed the results by sex on this page.
It's worth noting that guys - who often bring at least as much to modern relationships, and have been harassed into half-believing that ever pointing this out and negotiating is "abuse" or "coercion" - have the exact same options available. :)"

Meme - "Trying to see the good in men but catherine just dropped the lore on call her daddy and the wizard Liz is pregnant and just got cheated on"
Savanna Stone @savannafstone: "Just scrolled tiktok for 5 minutes and all of it was male hating propaganda. No wonder chronically online women hate men - it’s in their faces 24/7. Wanna see the good in men? delete tiktok 😂"
Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: ""The Womanosphere" is under-discussed.   Far more mainstream and damaging than the manosphere."
Modern Western society hates men too, after all

Weapon 𝕏 on X - "Women: Boobs aren’t sexual organs! Stop sexualizing boobs! Men can show their nipples in public, why can’t we?
Men: Aight then, send me a picture of your tiddies.
Women:"

Ritawilsonf on X - "my mom gets mad at me for constantly dating broke men but how do I tell her that rich guys are lazy in bed and broke guys fuck you like they're looking for a home"

Raliat🧶 on X - "Me wondering why all girls think they’re fat except the fat ones"

Héra on X - "You want to be a “tradwife” because you hate feminism and your job, I want to be a 50’s housewife so I can get a lobotomy and pop benzos before picking up cocaine cola at the grocery store and put hot dogs in jello for my husband 💅✨"

Jason Ochart on X - "I golfed with a hilarious 78 year old man, and he was dishing out life tips the whole time. The most DGAF guy I’ve ever met. He tells me after the round “don’t talk to me in the parking lot, my wife is picking me up and she thinks I went deaf 5 years ago.” What a legend."

Meme - "Women having standards
Amused wojak: Yess queen! Know your worth & never settle, you got this.
Men having standards
Raging wojak: You deserve male loneliness you're a incel & I hope you die lonely!"

Meme - "Her: You may know me but you don't know my story
Her story: *can with penises inside*"

Meme - MODERN MAN @imodernman: "An undeniable truth."
"CULTURE. Men Did Greater Things When It Was Harder To See Boobs. AMY OTTO"
Admiral Johnson @LongSchiongSil8: "African village, women are shirtless all day, no running water or electricity. Coincidence?"

Meme - Southpaw Soup @soupinthering: "skin transformation!!! all i did was let my bf nut on my face every night"

Meme - softdeadgf: "I can be this: and also like this: *made up woman, sweet cute woman*"
PotionEnjoyer: "Girl who post this wear nightmare before Christmas pajama pants in public and are 100 pounds overweight"

Meme - gabby @girllafraidd: "my italian grandmother looked at me and asked if the american dream is to be a whore"
"happy fourth from a supposed american dream"

Meme - "If you could live inside of me what part of my body would you live in?"
"Your pussy why"
"Omg"
"What"
"Your not sweet at all that's the most basic not caring answer"
"Like what u wamt me say your heart i would die of hypothermia cuz it's so cold
I guess I can live in your head I'd have a lot of room"

Psychological Treatment | Facebook - "Women don't understand what "indecent dressing" means until their maids wears it in front of their husbands. Suddenly, all the online talk about "empowerment" and "let women wear what they want" disappears. The next day, there’s a quiet, "friendly" chat. The wife pulls the housekeeper aside and says, “Hey, we’re just trying to keep things professional here, so maybe leggings are better for the gym.” The message is sent, loud and clear. A man watches this and sees the simple truth. It was never about politics or online arguments. It was about a woman protecting her territory. She doesn't want competition in her own home; she wants a sanctuary. And he knows, in that moment, that he needs a partner with that same instinct—one who naturally protects the peace of their home, instead of testing it."

Lisa Britton on X - "Now that young women are out-earning young men, is it going to become a new cultural norm to generally assume women will pay for the first few dates? No? Oh, ok. Just trying to figure out this whole gender equality, balancing for the past thing."
Feminists have a lot of interesting copes about why men should pay, so

My husband wanted to murder the man who killed our daughter, but I forgave him, he moved in with us, I see him as a son - "ON ELIZABETH Jimenez’s phone there’s a picture of her daughter Maria blowing a kiss... This is Nick Tay, 32, the man who caused Maria’s tragic death. The same man who Elizabeth has forgiven and now loves like a son... “Nick had been driving, there’d been a car crash, and Maria was gone.” Elizabeth didn’t yet know all the details. That at 1:20am the night before, with Maria in the front passenger seat, Nick had driven at 110mph in a 50mph zone. That the car had veered across two lanes before hitting the central reservation, rebounded back onto the grass verge and flipping over. She didn’t know that Nick was driving Maria’s car despite not having insurance, or that he’d emerged unharmed while Maria had been thrown from the vehicle... But as she held Fernando and wept, as they sat for hours in the hospital waiting to see Maria’s body, one thought kept whirling through Eizabeth’s mind. “‘What if it had been Fernando or Joshua at the wheel?’ I thought,” she says. “‘What if it had been me?’” “I knew that Nick had been arrested, and I couldn’t stop picturing him alone and terrified in the cells. “Instead of a desire to blame him, to vent my fury and scream for revenge, I just wanted to know that he was okay.”... Fernando and Elizabeth were united in their determination that Nick shouldn’t go to prison. “I knew that by forgiving Nick we shocked many people, from the police to some of Maria’s friends,” she says. “But we’d already lost Maria to this senseless tragedy, our darling girl was gone. “Locking Nick up in prison wouldn’t change that, it would only increase the misery. I knew it wasn’t what Maria would have wanted.” The couple then did something even more surprising. They asked Nick to move in with them. “His family were in Singapore, and with the prosecution approaching he had nowhere else to live,” Elizabeth explains. “In fact, it helped me as well as him. In those six weeks I felt the bond between us all grow, and it helped heal my heart... “Despite all my best efforts, when Nick pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving and causing death by driving an uninsured vehicle, he was jailed for five years,” Elizabeth remembers. “Hearing the sentence I collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably as he was led away. I felt so powerless. “I knew this wasn’t what Maria would have wanted.” It made Elizabeth even more determined to support Nick. “Every week Fernando and I visited Nick in Maidstone prison,” she says. “It was such a horrible place, so we focused on supporting him, always reminding him that he was forgiven and loved.” Elizabeth encouraged him to join the choir run by Beating Time, an organisation that helps prisoners rebuild their lives. In September 2019, after serving almost two years Nick was released, immediately deported back to Singapore. “I wasn’t allowed to see him before he left and missed him desperately,” Elizabeth admitted.
Apparently her whole family is made up of speeders

Meme - "If a woman is independent why would she be looking for a man to still provide a soft life or anything for her? Shouldn't she be searching for what shes lacking the most? in this case genuine attraction since she has it all?"
Chloe relly @chloiiiireely: "A man's biggest fear isn't a woman who is independent. It's a woman who is independent enough to know she deserves a 'soft life' he can't provide."

Meme - "SHE GOT A BBL.. BUT STILL CAN'T KEEP A MAN OR A CLEAN HOUSE"
Black woman taking selfie: "I know my worth. These dudes just intmidate."
Black kid: "Mama, we outta tissue again!"
*Bug on mirror, dirty dishes in sink, fighting kids, bug on wall, messy floor, messy clothes*

Meme - "Marriage in 1950
>Get some milkshakes with the boys
>See cute girl
>Talk to her, maybe dance a bit
>Get married a few weeks later
>Have five kids
>Get a job and buy a house after marriage
>Never divorce
Marriage in 2024
>Have a military-style workout routine, cold showers everyday with intensive skincare, spend years trying to get a good job and studying how to make women happy before even starting to date
>Go on dating app
>If you're lucky, someone's going to choose you in the human meat market
>Have to do all sorts of stupid stuff to get her dopamine fried brain to not get bored or get "the ick"
>Maybe she'll marry you after years of building muh heccin relationship
>Maybe get her to pump out one or two children from her wrinkly, egg deprived womb but probably not
>She'll divorce you the second she feels like it"

Demi Lovato’s Case Study And Why Women Are More Prone To Mimetic Desire - "Lovato’s transformation is less an isolated story and more a reflection of society. The way she appears to jump from different identities to ideologies offers a perfect case study in what, as our writer Ella Carroll-Smith has pointed out previously, French philosopher René Girard called mimetic desire: our tendency to want what others want, and to model our desires on people we perceive as “high-status” or even “aspirational.”... Mimetic desire explains why trends often appear out of nowhere and suddenly become inescapable. While Girard didn’t study fashion or femininity directly, his theory plays out clearly in today’s culture. Last year, we had the Stanley Cup craze. Which, in hindsight, all seems so ridiculous – why did we line up outside Target, elbowing our way through the doors just to grab a large metal tumbler during the holidays? Don't get me wrong, the special edition ones are really cute! But honestly, what possessed us?... These desires don’t necessarily arise from practicality or personal preference, and they gain traction because we see other women model them. As a result, we suddenly internalize their desirability through sheer exposure. Anyone can be swayed by the internet and their friend group, but I’d argue that women are on another level of getting “easily influenced.” Why? Studies have shown that women tend to be more empathetic and attuned to social cues... the media has been designed to exploit these instincts. They have learned to monetize our desires, redirect our aspirations, and flood our feeds with idealized versions of life and beauty. We change faster now. We mold ourselves more easily, and, unfortunately, we do it without conviction, believing each new algorithmic iteration is our truest self... The longing to be like someone else, to feel in the know, in step, or accepted, can begin to overpower our own internal compass. Slowly, our sense of self is replaced by a curated composite of other people’s preferences. Fashion doesn't feel unique anymore since it's no longer about self-expression or personal tastes... Let’s go back to Demi Lovato. Her arc can be read as an especially vivid portrait of mimetic shifts in real time. There was the emo phase during her Disney years, then the body-confident pop star era that condemned the diet culture, followed by the nonbinary buzzcut. She’s back to the thin, feminine rockstar aesthetic that reminds me of Kat Von D (who, ironically, rebranded in her own way), reviving her looks from nearly a decade ago. When we look back at each stage of her life, it's clear to me that they coincided with trends.   Her they/them era arrived when identity politics dominated the cultural conversation and queerness, fluidity, and political outrage were not just tolerated but algorithmically rewarded. She was apparently surrounded by figures like Alok Vaid-Menon, a controversial poet and performer whose ideas on gender were considered radical even among progressives. At the time, Lovato seemed to align herself with the dominant ideology of the cultural spaces she likely moved through, particularly among her circle of Hollywood friends. The media played a role in pushing this ideology as well.   But as we’ve seen time and time again, ideology is not static, and neither is desire. Today, a different set of values appears to be in vogue. It’s as if we’re back in the '90s and early 2000s, when being fit and thin was the standard of hot. Ozempic sales are at an all-time high. Even Lizzo – the fat positivity queen herself – admitted to using it, and has lost weight in recent years. There is a subtle yet growing return to traditional and elegant aesthetics (see “quiet luxury” or “mob wife” trends), a hunger for discipline and beauty.    To put it simply, the pendulum has swung again to the "normal" and "beautiful" ideal, and celebrities like Lovato have followed its rhythm... When a young girl becomes a household name before she even turns eighteen, how does she learn to distinguish her own voice from the applause or backlash of the crowd?"

Black People Appearing in Over 50% of UK Ads

One response to Channel 4's Mirror on the Industry report finding that black people are represented in 51% of commercials on UK TV is to say that there're multiple people in each advertisement, so this doesn't show a problem (I can't find the original tweet about this).

There're many things problematic about the Mirror on the Industry report. For example, it track the representation of LGBTQIA+ and Disabled People. Yet, what does a LGBTQIA+ or Disabled Person look like? Katy Montgomerie, a LGBTQ activist, says that you can't always tell if someone is trans (and gives examples of trans people who were outed - i.e. people couldn't tell before they were outed). And we have it on good authority from the UK Government that non-visible disabilities are a thing, and that we cannot ignore people with them. Indeed, Usdaw, "one of Britain's largest trade unions with over 360,000 members nationwide", informs us that 80% of disabilities in the UK cannot be seen. And representing every single "minority" in the tone and detail that the report demands is a huge headache (especially given that the report critiques montage-style ads - when montage-style ads are the only way to represent more groups). This is enough to put almost anyone off the task of pushing DEI in ads (which the report trumpets the importance of).

But let us go back to the seeming high representation of black people in UK ads.

There is a point in this - if, for the sake of argument, every ad had 100 people in it, and in half of adverts, 1 person was black, we could report that 50% of ads featured black people, but black representation would still be pretty poor (0.5%).

This suggests that to game this diversity metric, the solution is to have ads featuring as many people as possible, with each "minority" ticking off multiple boxes: for example, if you have an old, fat, black pregnant working-class transman in a wheelchair, that would tick seven boxes at once (getting it to, as the report demands, have a speaking role, be a lead character and not be in a 'stereotypical' job, whatever that might be, would be more complicated).

There is also a problem in the other direction - if one ad featured 100 black people in it, but 99 other ads had no one in them, we would erroneously report that only 1% of ads featured black people, when black people really made up 100% of people in ads.

A more useful metric, then, than the percentage of advertisements with black people (or whatever "minority" you want to measure) is the percentage of people in ads who are black.

Unfortunately, the report does not disclose this, but we do get a proxy answer on Page 34, which reports that 19% of characters portrayed as part of a family in 2024 were black. Finding primary sources for the black percentage of the UK is difficult - 4.0% of England and Wales was black in the 2021 Census, but I am unable to find primary sources reporting combined numbers for the whole of the United Kingdom. Wikipedia reports it as 3.7%, which is not unexpected given the populations of Scotland and Northern Ireland, so we can use that number. So we can see that, at least as part of a family, black people are significantly over-represented.

To confirm the results, let us try to look at the broader universe of ads, and do some calculations about the probability that pure chance could've resulted in the representation we see.

Channel 4's Mirror on the Industry looks at 1,000 UK TV ads from the previous year with highest adult impact. Unfortunately I do not have the manpower to look at 1,000 ads (if you want to fund me, we can discuss this separately). Nor do they provide details on how they select these, much less a list of the 1,000, though the research partner Tapestry does give a few details on how they code the ads.

I was also unable to find a list of the most viewed UK ads, only the "best" ones or "top" ones in curated lists, or the most viewed Christmas ads, or people's "favourite" ones.

The best source I could find was 2024’s 10 most-viewed ads on The Drum.

Here're the results of my count for each ad:

1) Heinz ‘Ketchup Insurance’ by FP7 McCann - 0 people (it's a collection of social media posts, a mock insurance policy and some graphics)
2) Cadbury ‘Yours for 200 Years’ by VCCP - 46 people (more than half of this is set in the past, but we know that historical anachronism is not a problem for diversity)
3) Apple ‘Custom Memory Movies’ by TBWA\Media Arts Lab, Los Angeles and Sydney (the embed wasn't working and TikTok didn't let me play the video even after I signed up, but I found another version) - 4 people
4) KFC ‘Tower Burger’ by Mother - 0 people (we just saw the chicken sandwich)
5) Tesco ‘Icons’ by BBH - 0 people (this was a static billboard and not a video ad)
6) Target ‘Born to be Kris’ by Target Creative - 1 person
7) Haribo ‘Kids’ Voices’ by Quiet Storm - 13 people
8) Beats by Dre ‘Beats’ by Mirimar - 15 people
9) Volvo ‘Meet the New Volvo’ by Hoyte Van Hoytema - 26+ (a lot of characters were blurry and/or the shots lasted a very short time)
10) Decathlon ‘Outage’ by Rethink - 0 people (this was a static billboard and not a video ad)

So in 8 ads, we had 101 people, for an average of 13 people an ad. Note that 2 of the ads featured 0 people, so they could not have featured a "minority". This doesn't stop these ads being chucked in the "no representation" box, since the assumption is that if an ad doesn't feature a "minority", it must feature straight white cismen.

Another huge problem with the counting was that it was often unclear how many distinct individuals were in each ad, as characters often were not identifiable. This ties into a bigger problem with this diversity audit: I couldn't even tell the race of many of the characters in the ads (gender was usually identifiable, but not always). So besides non-visible minority status; I have mentioned LGBTQ+ and disabled people earlier, but there're also lots of problems identifying ad characters who are 8 weeks pregnant, high functioning autistic people, working class etc - presumably the solution is to be even more heavy-handed and announce all the characters' attributes because Representation is so important.

Be that as it may, with these baseline numbers, we can now calculate what the probability of a randomly sampled ad (with randomly sampled casting) having a black person would be:

(1 - 0.963^13) = 38.7%

To unpack the maths, this calculates the probability that all 13 people in a UK ad would be non-black, assuming that the casting sampling was random from the general population. Subtracting this from 100% gets you the probability that at least 1 of the 13 would be black.

So we can indeed say that black people are over-represented in UK ads. In reality, given that

Also, given the issues with coding I have previously mentioned, the true over-sampling is likely more (unless we assume that all characters whose race cannot be clearly identified are white or another non-black minority which, while plausible, likely does not apply 100% of the time since the ad coders may not be that perceptive).