Links - 27th July 2024 (1 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023)

Saw a post asking about why there are yellow ribbons around trees, this is an answer for that post, found in a jewish restaurant in hove with wearable yellow ribbons next to it. : r/brighton - "Let us assume that 100% of Israeli hostages are civilians and innocent and only a third or you know what? A FOURTH of Palestinian hostages are innocent.  That would mean:  There are 120 Israeli hostages all innocent.  And 9,500/4 = 2375 Palestinian "innocent" hostages.  And this is me being very liberal with numbers. It doesn't matter how you spin it, there are at least as many innocent Palestinians in Israeli prisons as innocent Israelis in Hamas prisons.  At the end of the day all I am saying is ALL hostages should be released. If this is triggering for you then I pity you and your (lack of) humanity.  Done arguing with you. Good bye."
"I mean you're just making up numbers to be honest, right? Unless you have a source?  We know for sure that the Israeli prisoners were just kidnapped, so we can at least assume their innocence, since they weren't arrested for any discernible crimes by the Palestinians.  Your argument is basically that all prisoners should be freed because some of them may be innocent, in order to free the people we know are 100% innocent?  Does this logic extend to other prisons? Should say the UK, or France, or Germany, or America release all prisoners in case some of them are innocent?"
Once again, Israel always gets unique standards that no one else in the world is expected to follow

Saw a post asking about why there are yellow ribbons around trees, this is an answer for that post, found in a jewish restaurant in hove with wearable yellow ribbons next to it. : r/brighton - "It's not a lack of humanity.  It's reality from having visited Israel/Palestine many times.  I've seen terror attacks, such as bus bombings and stabbings. And the perpetrators arrested. And by your logic they are "hostages".  Saying convicted terrorists are hostages is vile false equivalence."
"I completely agree with you. While I'd assume that there must be some Palestinians who are innocent, falsely accused, tried and convicted - that's really not the same as just grabbing up people sleeping in their homes or kids at musical festivals. That AND there is an appeals process in Israel.  And it's not like people can't campaign for a release of convicted prisoners in Israeli prisons, wear Palestinian flags or watermelons if they so choose..."

Saw a post asking about why there are yellow ribbons around trees, this is an answer for that post, found in a jewish restaurant in hove with wearable yellow ribbons next to it. : r/brighton - "Please wear a yellow ribbon to support stealing Palestinian land"
Whataboutism is good when it supports the left wing agenda

Pride Toronto's statement on Gaza a betrayal of the Jewish community - "Ironically, the text espouses people to advocate for “solidarity with innocent civilians” in the region, but fails to acknowledge the 1,200 plus innocent civilians slaughtered by Hamas on Oct. 7. The biased nature of the statement is self-evident to the reader... Nowhere does Pride Toronto so much as acknowledge Hamas’s responsibility for initiating the conflict by choosing to launch its barbaric assault on Oct. 7, and only a cursory reference was made to the one hundred plus hostages that remain trapped in Gaza... Pride Toronto has often refrained from weighing in on complex geopolitical issues. After all, its entire purpose is to create as welcoming, open, and non-judgemental a place as possible for LGBTQ individuals and allies from all backgrounds and all walks of life. Perhaps for this reason, Pride Toronto did not release a statement in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Nor did they comment on the increasing oppression of LGBTQ individuals in the Russian Federation. They were also silent following the recent decision by Uganda’s constitutional court to uphold a bill that re-criminalized homosexuality and instituted the death penalty for anyone caught engaging in certain homosexual acts. In this context, it is worth questioning Pride Toronto’s motives for weighing in on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in such a controversial and contentious manner. The statement was a stinging betrayal of one of Pride’s longest-standing allies. For decades, Jewish activists and organizations have played a vital role in advancing LGBT rights in Canada. In 2022, Pride Toronto thanked B’nai Brith Canada after it exposed the nefarious intentions of a contingent of Black Hebrew Israelite extremists from the United States, who planned to travel to Canada and disrupt that year’s Pride festival. B’nai Brith, after unravelling the homophobic plot, passed the information on to law enforcement and Pride Toronto, allowing them to act before the hatemongers could create a disturbance."

Gaza destruction likely helped push Hamas to soften cease-fire demands, several officials say - "Several officials in the Middle East and the U.S. believe the level of devastation in the Gaza Strip caused by a nine-month Israeli offensive likely has helped push Hamas to soften its demands for a cease-fire agreement. Hamas over the weekend appeared to drop its longstanding demand that Israel promise to end the war as part of any cease-fire deal. The sudden shift has raised new hopes for progress in internationally brokered negotiations."

Anne Frank monument defaced with ‘Gaza’ graffiti in Amsterdam
Peter Savodnik on X - "We defaced a monument to a Jewish girl murdered for being Jewish three years before the Jewish state was founded but we're not antisemites."
Clearly, this is just anti-Zionism and if you criticise this you oppose freedom of speech, are racist against Palestinians and are just a Nazi. But of course this is a Zionist false flag to defame Palestinians

Iranian government actors seeking to 'take advantage' of pro-Palestinian protests in US: DNI - "Iranian government actors are seeking to "take advantage" of pro-Palestinian protests in the United States, according to the director of National Intelligence, including providing financial support to some protesters.  "In recent weeks, Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza, using a playbook we’ve seen other actors use over the years," DNI Avril Haines said in a statement. "We have observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters."  This is all part of Iran's efforts to influence "our democratic process" according to Haines... "Iran is becoming increasingly aggressive in their foreign influence efforts, seeking to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions, as we have seen them do in the past, including in prior election cycles," she said. "They continue to adapt their cyber and influence activities, using social media platforms and issuing threats. It is likely they will continue to rely on their intelligence services in these efforts, as well as Iran-based online influencers, to promote their narratives."  In the 2020 election cycle Iranian actors sent spoof text messages around purporting to be the Proud Boys."
Foreign interference is only disqualifying when it hurts the left wing agenda

Visegrád 24 on X - "BREAKING: Swedish police confirms that 3 participants of the Malmö Gay Pride Parade in Sweden were beaten up for wearing Stars of David. The migrant men who attacked them said:
- “Do you support killing children?”
- “You f*cking f*ggots”
- “You think I won’t hit a f*g?”
🇸🇪🇮🇱"
Obviously, Israel is to blame

Trendy appointments: Australia’s special anti-Semitism envoy - "Was there any need for this?... “To promote social cohesion, we have appointed Jillian Segal AO as special envoy to combat anti-Semitism.”...   In what is becoming a force of habit, Albanese’s announcement had a scouring effect on the very cohesion he was praising. While also announcing that a special envoy for Islamophobia was in the works, with details to “be announced shortly”, the impression was unmistakable: the concerns and fears of one group had been chronologically privileged and elevated in the pantheon of policy.   The response from the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) articulated that very sentiment. The move of appointing “a taxpayer-funded special envoy on anti-Semitism” was: “Particularly concerning as it singles out anti-Semitism for special government investment and attention, while failing to address the increasingly frequent and severe forms of racism experienced by Palestinians, Muslims, First Nations people and other marginalised communities.”   APAN President Nasser Mashni expanded on the theme: “This seems to be yet another example of the Australian Government pandering to pro-Israel groups, and pitting parts of the Jewish community against the Palestinian Muslim communities – and against each other – rather than working to realise equal right and justice for all.” Not too socially cohesive, then."   The organisation also worried that the creation of a dedicated office to combat one form of religious and ethnic prejudice was at odds with current work to combat “existing systemic approaches to anti-racism” being undertaken by the Australian Human Rights Commission’s recently appointed race discrimination commissioner"
Not all minorities are created equal. Imagine protesting combatting any other sort of hate, let alone such a big variety (Jews were much bigger victims of hate crimes than Muslims, for example - being victims more often despite being 1/8 the latter's population)
Presumably these people will also protest the envoy for Islamophobia

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "The leader of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network Nasser Mashni has today condemned the announcement of a special government envoy for combating anti-Semitism because he is himself an anti-Semite"

Bolt: Pro-Palestine activists are a danger to Australia - "No, this isn’t really about stopping deaths in Gaza. It looks instead like an attack on Australia.  The damage being done is stunning. Most obviously, protesters are importing a Jew-hatred unparalleled in our history.  They started on October 9 – just two days after Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1200 Israelis, raped women, beheaded men, shot children in front of their parents and kidnapped 253 people – by disrupting a planned memorial at the Sydney Opera House to the victims.  “F … the Jews,” some chanted. “Where’s the Jews?”  At that rally were Sydney University academics, including senior lecturer Nick Riemer, so pitiless that he refused to condemn the slaughter and rape of the Jews, saying: “Resistance is justified.”  This shocking indifference has spread now to students occupying parts of some of our top universities.  An organiser of the Australian National University occupation told ABC radio: “Hamas deserves our unconditional support.”  An Adelaide University protest organiser, Habibah Jahoori, said the same: ”Unconditional solidarity to the resistance.”  These protesters are also brutalising Australia by normalising the rhetoric of political violence.  Many dress as Hamas terrorists with keffiyehs masking their faces, while pushing people around and chanting the Hamas-endorsed slogan to wipe out Israel: “From the river to the sea …”  Students at both Sydney University and Melbourne University have chanted “Intifada, intifada” – the word for terrorist wars against Israeli Jews – and Macquarie University academic Randa Abdel-Fattah posted how she was “inspired” by a Palestinian female terrorist who helped to slaughter 13 Jewish children in a raid on Tel Aviv.  These protesters are also preaching an unhinged hatred of Australia, and – worse – linking a war started by Hamas terrorists to Aboriginal activists “resisting” our supposedly white “occupation”.  Palestinian flags dominated many protests against Australia Day this year, and GetUp, our biggest Left-wing activist group, posted a call to arms from board member Sara Saleh claiming Israelis “have also been invested in killing us (Palestinians), in restricting our freedoms, all of that should sound familiar to anyone living in Australia” because “we are all in this same shared anti-colonial struggle”.  What’s actually linked is this hatred of Australia with the crudely racist identity politics of some anti-Israel protest leaders. Take Nasser Mashni, head of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, who last week ranted: “Israel and Australia share two things in common, aside from being a s--thole, racist, settler colony … They also have the highest incidence of skin cancer.”  Untrue. Israel is 23rd on that list, but Mashni used his fake statistic to delegitimise white Australians here and supposedly white Jews in Israel: “Their skin is designed for northern Europe … but our skin is designed for this land, it’s designed for the Middle East.”"

Victorian premier 'disgusted' after pro-Palestinian protesters storm Labor state conference - "Pro-Palestinian protesters have been lashed as bullies and anti-Semites by Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan after storming a Labor state conference in Melbourne amid heightened tensions over the Hamas-Israel war.  Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters breached security and entered Moonee Valley Racecourse on Saturday as Victorian Labor MPs, members and unionists gathered for the two-day event... After making their way upstairs, the group chanted "Labor Party you can't hide, you're supporting genocide" in a credential area.  They then started banging on the conference room doors, before police moved them downstairs... A Victoria Police spokeswoman told AAP the protesters left without incident and no arrests were made."
Victorian premier accuses pro-Palestine protesters of bringing ‘violence, homophobia and antisemitism’ to Labor conference - "Footage shows Fraser MP Daniel Mulino being shoved by members of the crowd before security guards stepped in and began escorting Labor members. One guard fell on to a moving escalator as protesters pushed past.  Guardian Australia understands at least one state minister was taunted with homophobic slurs as they arrived."
Storming government buildings, intimidating politicians and homophobia are good when you're pushing the left wing agenda

Israel-Hamas war: Former Australian PM’s condemn ‘hatred’ spread by Hamas - "Six former prime ministers have made an unprecedented intervention in the Israel-Hamas conflict, issuing a joint letter declaring “there is no more tenaciously evil race hatred than antisemitism” and warning that terrorist organisation Hamas wants to fuel ancient hatreds throughout the world.  In a public letter drafted by John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, all six said that “no complaint or concern about international affairs justifies hate speech against any Australian, or any Australian community."... Victorian Labor MP Maria Vamvakinou, a long-time supporter of Palestine, said... “Unless Palestinians are given self-determination and statehood this cycle of violence will never end.”"
Maria Vamvakinou has a very poor understanding of history, since they already got self-determination and statehood but continued their terrorism

“Israel is bombing, Valerie is supplying the weapons!” : The mayor of Montreal evacuated during a borough council - "Valérie Plante had to be evacuated during a district council on Tuesday evening when pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted the session."

UK anti-Israel activists vandalize packaging supplies company - "Anti-Israel activists vandalized a British packaging supply company in Sittingbourne on Monday, Palestine Action and Kite Packaging said in statements. "Drop Elbit" was painted in red on the facade of the company's facility, and windows were completely smashed. Vehicles were also vandalized, resulting in tens of thousands of pounds in damages... Palestine Action took responsibility for the vandalism, saying on Instagram that they had targeted Kite because they ostensibly provided packaging for Elbit products. The group had allegedly found packaging materials related to Kite during a June 17 raid on a Kent Elbit facility. Kite said in its statement that it doesn't have a customer called Elbit, "which makes this situation even more perplexing.""

Update from the Policy Forum on our approach to ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for hate speech - "The word “Zionist” has layers of meaning based on its origins and usage today, and may also be highly dependent on context. This term often refers to supporters of a political movement, which is not itself a protected characteristic under our policies, but in some cases may be used as a proxy to refer to Jewish or Israeli people, which are protected characteristics under our Hate Speech policy... we have consulted with 145 stakeholders representing civil society and academia across the Middle East and Africa, Israel, North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Stakeholders have included political scientists, historians, legal scholars, digital and civil rights groups, freedom of expression advocates, and human rights experts... we will now remove content that targets "Zionists" with dehumanizing comparisons, calls for harm, or denials of existence on the basis that “Zionist” in those instances often appears to be a proxy for Jewish or Israeli people... Our longstanding approach to the word “Zionist” under our Hate Speech policy has been to treat the word as a proxy for Jewish or Israeli people in two narrow circumstances: (1) where Zionists are compared to rats, reflecting known antisemitic imagery, and (2) where context makes clear that “Zionist” means “Jew” or “Israeli” (e.g., “Today the Jews celebrate Passover. I hate those Zionists.”). This approach will remain in place. However, we have determined that the existing policy guidance does not sufficiently address the ways people are using the term “Zionist” online and offline. Going forward, we will remove content attacking “Zionists” when it is not explicitly about the political movement, but instead uses antisemitic stereotypes, or threatens other types of harm through intimidation, or violence directed against Jews or Israelis under the guise of attacking Zionists, including:
Claims about running the world or controlling the media;
Dehumanizing comparisons, such as comparisons to pigs, filth, or vermin;
Calls for physical harm;
Denials of existence;
Mocking for having a disease."
Terrorism supporters are very upset that their dog whistle is recognised

Brianna Wu on X - "Haha. The commies over at DSA just disowned their only real successful politician, AOC, because they didn’t like the nuance in her approach to Palestine. I’m telling y’all, abandon progressives. They canibalize everyone eventually. Respectful disagreement does not compute."

University student who yelled 'Free Palestine' reportedly deported as UAE weighs Israel-Hamas war - "At the graduation ceremony of New York University Abu Dhabi this May, a student wearing the traditional Palestinian black-and-white keffiyeh scarf shouted “Free Palestine!” as he crossed the stage to receive his diploma, witnesses say. Days later, he reportedly was deported from the United Arab Emirates... Before the graduation ceremony, students had been told that “displaying the Palestinian flag anywhere on campus is not permitted and this was strictly executed, even in residential buildings,” said another student, who similarly spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.  In total, five students speaking on condition of anonymity described similar circumstances leading up to the graduation affecting those who earlier sought to bulk-buy keffiyehs as a fundraiser and organize vigils for the dead in Gaza... It also claimed that staff and students from non-Western countries had been “detained, intimidated, and deported based on surveillance.”"
Damn Zionists!

Thread by @jnewsgabe on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Just got off the phone with a young professional in the Bay Area who broke down sobbing about the amount of vitriolic antisemitism coming from his colleagues. It was striking to hear a grown man cry, but my main takeaway was that the worst part is the gaslighting-- the insistence that no, this isn't racism, this is antiracism. This is speaking truth to power. It's subversive in an essential way--such that any pushback only reinforces the righteousness of the cause. Second is the abject dehuminization of anyone cursed enough to bear the title of "Zionist," a term now worse, in popular discourse, than "racist," or "capitalist," or most any other terms one can think of. To support the existence of a Jewish state in some portion of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It's a belief  shared by most American Jews and their parents, grandparents, uncles, nieces, nephews, and children. It's simply a feeling that it is, well, a good thing for Israel to exist. Even passive support for the existence of a Jewish state Has become grounds for the most heinous accusations, that you are literally a Nazi, that you not only support genocide but are complicit in it. So yeah, one can understand why this could make someone cry."

Andrew Fox on X - "I swear to God there are two wars happening. There’s everything that’s actually happening in Gaza. Then there’s this insane online version where countries map their own weird social issues onto it and just invent stuff and start shrieking about genocide and sharing TikToks."

Candidates faced 'alarming rise' in abuse during election campaign, says Home Secretary - "It comes after some Labour candidates and MPs spoke of being targeted by bullying and intimidating behaviour throughout the campaign, particularly over the party’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.  Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, was booed and jeered by pro-Palestine supporters during her acceptance speech on July 4.  Jonathan Ashworth, who lost his Leicester South seat to a pro-Gaza independent, said he was forced to hide in a vicarage from protesters and was the subject of anonymous leaflets calling him “Genocide Jon”... Lord Walney, the Government adviser on political violence, told The Guardian on Sunday that the UK had seen an increase in “US-style politics of aggressive confrontation and intimidation”, raising the risk of another assassination attempt on a British politician.  The political violence tsar added that he believed intimidation was more regularly being used as an “electoral strategy” and that there was a particular pattern of abuse “created by aggressive pro-Palestine activists”."
More censorship of pro-Palestinian speech! Time to ban Reform and jail the far right to keep people safe

Hen Mazzig on X - "BREAKING: The Paris memorial for the 1972 Olympic massacre is going to be held in secret due to concerns that it will be a target for violence.  It was originally supposed to take place at the Paris City Hall but was canceled because of safety concerns and moved to a secret location.  This memorial commemorates the 11 Israelis who were killed by the Black September terrorist group when they infiltrated the Olympic village and took the Israeli team hostage, before killing them.  Jews are being forced to commemorate their dead in secret to avoid being targeted by attacks.  This is how Jews will remember 2024. This is the state of antisemitism in France, and all over the world."

Facebook - "YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS UP: Masked anti-Israel protesters issued demands at the Islington police station in the UK and claim that police touched a Muslim, disabled, trans person of color, to show their show their support for the violent genocidal Zionists, who directed them to violently arrest members of the encampment. Last night we were attacked by 2 Zionists at our encampment, who then called police and directed them to violently arrest members of the encampment. Police showing their support for the violent genocidal Zionists proceeded to arrest 7 of our comrades. Police officers touched a Muslim, disabled, Trans person of color without consent and refused to give them medical treatment for over an hour and the. For over an hour obstructed the ambulance from leaving with the injured comrade.... all whilst mocking and laughing at them and purposefully misgendering them."
Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 on X - "“Police officers touched a Muslim disabled Trans person of colour without consent.” Yes, this is a real video."

Antisemitic TikTok terrorist jailed for encouraging terrorism and sharing material - "Hamza Alam, 22, \disguised himself before posting videos on TikTok.  A number of his posts included hostile references to Jewish people alongside a video that encouraged viewers to attack and kill Jews following the Gaza and Israel conflict. Another post celebrated the 9/11 attacks...   Alam also created a shareable folder which included Islamic State propaganda and videos containing images of public floggings.   Today at Woolwich Crown Court he was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and a further year on licence thereafter. He was previously found guilty of three counts of disseminating a terrorist publication and one count of encouraging terrorism following a trial at the same court which concluded in April."
More censorship of pro-Palestinian speech! This will have a chilling effect on free speech

Far-right groups that block aid to Gaza receive tax-deductible donations from US and Israel - "The three groups examined by AP and Shomrim have slowed the delivery of aid by blocking trucks on their way to Gaza, either by snarling traffic or simply standing in front of the main Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza."
Of course, all the far left "pro-Palestinian" groups which get tax benefits for inciting chaos and violence are a good thing
Weird. I thought peaceful protest was a basic democratic right

Meme - "Gaza is a special place where you can be in an "open air prison" but have a zoo and water parks and gain 50 Ibs while "there's a famine" and "You've officially ran out of food""
Hind Khoudary @Hind_...: "We officially ran out of food."
Nov 2023: *thin*
TODAY: *fat*

Meme - @Idgafwarvet: "We need a Disney princess who joins hamas"

Links - 26th July 2024 (2)

Europe gives China a taste of its own trade medicine - "Over the past years, EU trade policy has traditionally focused on building protective fortress walls, and last week's decision to impose punitive tariffs on Chinese electric cars initially looked like another example of the classic defensive playbook in Brussels.  In a remarkable turn of events, however, the EU is now considering a next step that invites China's electric vehicle (EV) makers inside the walls. The big idea is to use the tariff threat to force Chinese carmakers to come to Europe to form joint ventures and share technology with their EU counterparts... For years, the EU has been at the vanguard of western investors howling in protest at Beijing's demands that foreign investors in China should form joint ventures and share know-how: It’s what the EU used to slam as forced technology transfer.  The world has now changed. The fear is no longer that the Chinese will steal European EV technology in a game of catch-up, but rather that Europe is falling behind. Realizing that its industry needs fresh investment and expertise to compete, the EU is now turning its eyes toward a negotiated solution with Beijing...   According to the German Chamber of Commerce in China, 69 percent of German automotive companies reckon their Chinese competitors already lead them in innovation or will do so within the next five years."

Meme - "顺肉 Wood shall be meat
莶肉 Toothpicks meat
烤肉 Fried meat
菜肉 Celery meat
爆肉 Onion Explosion meat
肉丝 Fish-flavored shredded pork
肉丝 Pure speculation meat
鸡丁 Kungpo-Chicken
鸡丁 Cashew Chicken
肉丝 Pure Belly Clearance
马鱼块 The fish mother
羊肉 Iron lamb"

(3) Making 400 Year Old Buttered Beere - YouTube - "Most people know Butterbeer from the Harry Potter books, but did you know it's based off an actual drink from Elizabethan England?   In this episode, I show you how to make your own alcoholic (and non-alcoholic) Buttered Beere and we explore the importance of beer and ale in Medieval and Renaissance England."

DeepDive: What a pro-growth tax reform might look like - "The above analysis presented several broad-based, pro-growth reforms that could improve the country’s economic climate, while also introducing more fairness and simplicity into the tax system, including:
   Increasing fairness and reducing disincentives to work by lowering marginal tax rates on working families
   Reducing top marginal tax rates and/or thresholds to help Canada attract and retain high-skilled workers
   Use broad-based reforms to the corporate income tax system to incentivize new investments
   Increasing taxes on consumption to fund even more dramatic reductions in economically costly taxes on income—not necessarily by increasing the GST, but by further incentivising savings that can be used as investment in Canada’s economy
   Simplify the tax system to reduce compliance costs"
Too bad left wing economic policy is about making the "rich" suffer, not about increasing the size of the pie for everyone

David Mulroney: The next PM must remind Canada’s public servants who really runs the show - "When I served as foreign policy advisor to the prime minister (a public service appointment within the Privy Council Office) I struggled for months to obtain a list of initiatives Canada was supporting at the U.N. under the heading of “Maternal Health.” I came to believe I was being stonewalled because officials were reluctant to reveal the extent to which Canada was promoting abortion in the developing world... as ambassador for Canada in China, I refused to sign off on a CIDA project that had as its objective improving the business skills of Tibetan women dubiously identified as “sex workers.” I suggested that we instead offer training in skills that would free women in Tibet from having to sell themselves to Chinese truckers to feed their families. CIDA ignored me and quietly secured project sign-off back at headquarters."

David Attenborough’s anti-human miserabilism - "Our planet is wonderful, but it sure isn’t A Perfect Planet, as the title of David Attenborough’s latest BBC spectacular declares. To claim so is a statement of blind faith, not an observation grounded in reality. And the fact this is the central rhetorical claim of Attenborough’s latest programme is startlingly revealing, as well as misleading...  to call the state of the natural world ‘perfect’ at any one point in time is not only nonsensical but anti-scientific.  After all, was the Earth perfect when a meteor smashed into it, killing 99 per cent of life? Was it perfect when toxic volcanic gases spread across entire continents and blocked out the Sun for years? Was it perfect when the bubonic plague killed millions, triggering the only major fall in the human population in history? Would humanity not mobilise all of its technology and resources to fight such terrifying natural events should they happen again? Or would we declare them part of our ‘perfect planet’ and meekly succumb to fate?  Attenborough’s well-known support for reducing human-population size is perhaps one reason why he seems perfectly happy to accept huge population-reducing events as part of his ‘perfect’ planet. Others less Malthusian than Sir David might not be quite so callously accepting of nature’s ‘perfection’.   Hence we don’t accept the global coronavirus pandemic as merely another wondrous aspect of our perfect planet. Rather we recognise it as a problem nature has thrown up that we must overcome – using science and technology. And in doing so, we ourselves seek to change, perhaps even ‘perfect’ nature... In the final episode, Niall McCann, a biologist, conservationist and explorer, says ‘this perfect planet of ours has been thrown into a state of flux’ thanks to the human species, which has become ‘so populous and so destructive that it has become the single most influential creature on Earth’. He even tells us that a catastrophe like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs will happen again. Writer Jeremy Rifkin gives the message an economic spin, announcing that ‘our mission is not growth, growth, growth’. Unchallenged, he tells viewers what infrastructure and power sources we should build and how we should reorganise our economy to preserve this perfect planet.   The entire final episode, in fact, is not natural history at all. Instead, it features a series of activists delivering ultimatums, while Attenborough argues for an expansive array of global policy proposals. Many, such as spreading seeds in barren areas of the Amazon, seem eminently reasonable and hard to fault. But some, such as ‘financially incentivising’ foreign government involvement in developing nations, are deeply political and highly contested. And the message itself – millenarian, apocalyptic and coercive – is not without its critics, even within the environmentalist movement.  Such a biased perspective should not be presented as fact, according to the BBC’s and Ofcom’s own guidelines. But because both institutions have now declared climate change an exceptional issue, there is no room for comeback. Indeed, since 2017 Ofcom has insisted that only one message on climate change is acceptable, ruling against the BBC for giving space to opposing views. The BBC has certainly got the message. It said that it had conceived of A Perfect Planet as an explicitly campaigning project to ‘raise awareness’ and deliver a ‘serious message’. Towards the very end of the series, several well-spoken teens tell us the ‘planet may not be able to sustain life’ by the time they are adults, as they stare down the camera at their potential killers. ‘Do you want to be the generation who signs the death warrant of humanity?’, Rifkin asks in the closing shots... If children grow up believing man is nothing but a plague upon a ‘perfect planet’ – that we are a virus, if you will – they will have no faith in humanity itself. And that would be no good for us, or the planet."
We are still told that environmentalism isn't misanthropic

I can see you typing: the most awkward part of online chat - "One of writing’s traditional advantages over speech is the time it affords you to collect your thoughts. This time empowers you to calculate your words’ effects on their reader. Rather than blurting out “YOU’RE SO HOT,” you pen a pleasing phrase: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”  Text and instant messages, however, are eroding this advantage. We don’t correspond over text and instant messages, like we do in letters; we chat in quick informal exchanges, like we do face-to-face. And one of the underpinnings of spoken conversation is what’s known in linguistics as turn-taking. “We need some way of determining when someone else’s turn is over and ours can begin,” says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown and author of You Just Don’t Understand. “In speaking, we sense whether others are done – their voices trail off, their intonation goes down, they seem to have finished making a point, they leave a pause to let us know they’re finished.”   It’s not as simple as it sounds. Tannen’s research has shown that conversational turn-taking actually creates a lot of social friction."
From 2014

Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "There have been 8 Christian Prime Ministers in Japan even though the Christians make less than 1% of Japan's population."

Meme - Busty Woman: "Your son is not focused in class"
Man: "sorry, what did u say?"

MaxHelp on X - "We mistakenly sent out an empty test email to a portion of our HBO Max mailing list this evening. We apologize for the inconvenience, and as the jokes pile in, yes, it was the intern. No, really. And we’re helping them through it. ❤️"
aerin on X - "Dear Intern, when I was 25 I made a PDF assigning each employee to the Muppet they reminded me of the most. I meant to send it to my work friend, but I accidentally sent it to the entire company. My supervisor (Beaker) wanted to fire me, but the owners (Bert & Ernie) intervened."
HyperX on X - "Long ago a member of the team accidentally added an extra 0 to an ad campaign spending 10x more than what we had budgeted. We all make mistakes. 💜"
Mekka 💉x7 @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io on X - "To the intern: Hi! 🙋🏿‍♂️ I'm an Engineering Director on Google Play. Our team's systems send the emails for the Play Store.
|1. You'll be fine! As replies show, everyone breaks production!
|2. Congratulations on helping your team find missing guardrail features and capabilities!👍🏿"
Daenney on X - "Dear intern, I once globally took down Spotify. It almost happened twice. My team was awesome about it and I'm still here. You managed to find something broken in the way integration tests are done. It's a good thing and will help improve things. Good luck <3."
Microsoft Outlook on X- "Dear Intern, we've all hit the send button before we should've. It happens to the best of us 💙"
James Harper on X - "Dear Intern, I once auto-populated a mass vet email from @morris_animal to list the constituents as their “dogs name” instead of their first name and it got the best email response ever. A mistake turned into a new marketing process when we sent mass emails."
Caissie on X -  "Dear Intern, I was using my desktop calendar to make a monthly note of when I started my menstrual period, but after several months I realized I was making that note on a calendar I shared with all of my colleagues company wide. I was 37 years old."

Ontario Liberal MP's map of Canada forgets P.E.I., Yukon - "Yasir Naqvi's map of Canada map depicts a country Canadians are not familiar with — it has eight provinces and two territories... The map also included several inconsistencies with provincial and territorial borders.  The Quebec border takes over New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, lumping them into one province.  And the border between Yukon and Northwest Territories has disappeared, merging the territories into one.  The map has been making the rounds online, with many questioning how it was approved despite the inaccuracies."

What type of mattress should be chosen to avoid back pain and improve sleep quality? Review of the literature - "Energy spent during daily activities is recuperated by humans through sleep, ensuring optimal performance on the following day. Sleep disturbances are common: a meta-analysis on sleep quality showed that 15–30% of adults report sleep disorders, such as sleep onset latency (SOL), insufficient duration of sleep and frequently waking up at night. Low back pain (LBP) has been identified as one of the main causes of poor sleep quality. Literature findings are discordant on the type of mattress that might prevent onset of back pain, resulting in an improved quality of sleep. We conducted a systematic literature review of articles published until 2019, investigating the association of different mattresses with sleep quality and low back pain. Based on examined studies, mattresses were classified according to the European Committee for Standardization (2000) as: soft, medium-firm, extra-firm or mattresses customized for patients affected by supine decubitus. A total of 39 qualified articles have been included in the current systematic review. Results of this systematic review show that a medium-firm mattress promotes comfort, sleep quality and rachis alignment."

George R.R. Martin | Facebook - "The Adaptation Tango...
Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.”   It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone.   No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it.   “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound.   Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though.   Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse. Once in a while, though, we do get a really good adaptation of a really good book, and when that happens , it deserves applause. I can came across one of those instances recently, when I binged the new FX version of SHOGUN. Must confess, I was dubious when I first heard they were making another version of the Clavell novel.   It has been a long time, a long long LONG time, but I read the book when it first came out in the late 70s and was mightily impressed.   (I really need to give it a reread one of these days, but there are so many books, so little time).   And the 1980 miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain as the Anjin was a landmark of long form television, right up with with ROOTS; why do it over again, when that version was so good? I am glad they did, though.   The new SHOGUN is superb.   Better than Chamberlain’s version, you ask?   Hmmm, I don’t know.   I have not watched the 1980 miniseries since, well, 1980.   That one was great too.   The fascinating thing is that while the old and new versions have some significant differences — the subtitles that make the Japanese dialogue intelligible to English speaking viewers being the biggest — they are both faithful to the Clavell novel in their own way.   I think the author would have been pleased.   Both old and new screenwriters did honor to the source material, and gave us terrific adaptations, resisting the impulse to “make it their own.” But don’t take my word for it.   Watch it yourself. Acting, directing, set design, costume… it’s all splendid here.  Along with the writing. And if SHOGUN is a big enough hit, maybe the same team will adapt some of Clavell’s other novels."

George RR Martin, Neil Gaiman Hate Hollywood Changing Source Material - "“I spent 30 years watching people make ‘Sandman’ their own. And some of those people hadn’t even read ‘Sandman’ to make it their own, they’d just flipped through a few comics or something.” Gaiman added that it was a “joy” getting to make Season 1 of “The Sandman” on Netflix, and Martin energized the crowd by saying, “We want Season 2!” Martin continued, “There are changes that you have to make — or that you’re called upon to make — that I think are legitimate. And there are other ones that are not legitimate.” He recalled adapting Roger Zelazny’s “The Last Defender of Camelot” for an episode of “The Twilight Zone” and, due to budget constraints, being forced to choose between having horses or an elaborate Stonehenge-esque set for a battle scene. (He didn’t want to make the decision, so he called up Zelazny, who chose to scrap the horses.) “That, to my mind, is the kind of stuff you are called upon to do in Hollywood that is legitimate.” An example of an “illegitimate” change, Martin said, was CBS making him include an “ordinary person” who just “tags along” in the episode in order to appeal to a “high concept.”   “I was new to Hollywood,” Martin said. “I didn’t say, ‘You’re fucking morons.'”  Martin related the topic to the Iron Throne in HBO’s adaptation of his “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels. “Why is the Iron Throne in ‘Game of Thrones’ not the Iron Throne as described in the books? Why is it not 15 feet high and made of 10,000 swords? Because the ceiling in our soundstage was not 15 feet high! We couldn’t fit in in there, and they weren’t willing to give us St. Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey to shoot our little show in.”  Answering a question about the multiple perspectives that make up the Targaryen history in “Fire & Blood,” Martin said there is no one “true” account — something that reflects our real history.  “The joy of history and history books is we use the word ‘probably’ a lot,” Gaiman said.  Martin responded, “A lot of people don’t want grey characters — they want heroes, they want villains. And we see that in real history. Especially here in America, we grow up and we hear about the Founding Fathers and various people in the past, and they’re our heroes. They’re wonderful, they’re flawless. And then we find out later that maybe they weren’t flawless. Maybe they had a flaw here and there. Maybe they did some pretty bad things occasionally. But they also did good things.”   He continued, “There seems to be a lot of people who cannot accept that. If they find a flaw, they immediately move shining hero to absolute dirtbag, and now we have to despise this person. Really, most human beings are somewhere in the middle. And we should just accept that.”   Asked if the Targaryen dynasty “deserved” to fall, Martin said it’s up to the reader. “There were Targaryens who did something good on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday did something reprehensible. Also, of course, our standards of what constitutes ‘reprehensible’ change.”"

Dutch volleyball player who raped 12-year-old British girl qualifies for Paris Olympics - "Steven van de Velde was sentenced in March 2016 to four years in prison after admitting three counts of rape against a child he had met on Facebook. He had flown from the Netherlands to the UK in August 2014, when he was 19, to meet his victim.   Judge Francis Sheridan told him: “Prior to coming to this country you were training as a potential Olympian. Your hopes of representing your country now lie as a shattered dream.”  Except Van de Velde, who was released after serving just 12 months at a Dutch prison, has since been allowed to rehabilitate his Olympic career, this month sealing his spot in the national pair at the Paris Games alongside Matthew Immers... Van de Velde’s comeback presents a major moral conundrum for the International Olympic Committee. Every Paris Olympian is required to sign an Athletes’ Rights and Responsibilities Declaration, with point seven demanding: “Act as a role model.” Having travelled from Amsterdam to Milton Keynes to have sex with a girl he knew was just 12, Van de Velde was condemned in the strongest terms in 2016 by the judge. The court heard that he had gone to the home of the victim, with whom he had communicated on social networks before arranging to visit, while her mother was out and had taken her virginity."

Frozen embryo conceived the year after her mother was born - "  Emma Wren Gibson, delivered November 25 by Dr. Jeffrey Keenan, medical director of the National Embryo Donation Center, is the result of an embryo originally frozen on October 14, 1992.  Emma’s parents, Tina and Benjamin Gibson of eastern Tennessee, admit feeling surprised when they were told the exact age of the embryo thawed March 13 by Carol Sommerfelt, embryology lab director at the National Embryo Donation Center.  “Do you realize I’m only 25? This embryo and I could have been best friends,” Tina Gibson said.  Today, Tina, now 26, explained to CNN, “I just wanted a baby. I don’t care if it’s a world record or not.”... Emma’s story begins long before the Gibsons “adopted” her (and four sibling embryos from the same egg donor). Created for in vitro fertilization by another, anonymous couple, the embryos had been left in storage so they could be used by someone unable or unwilling to conceive a child naturally."
From 2017

Nvidia appears to have a major problem with wealthy middle managers who do barely any work - and new starters aren't happy - "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly addressed worker complacency in a recent all-hands meeting following complaints that some employees are simply coasting along while enjoying bumper paycheques... some middle managers have entered a “semi-retirement” stage whereby they’re not putting in the work that’s worthy of their high salary. Several reasons for this complacency were cited, indicating that the inherently poor work ethic relates to workers resting and vesting. According to the report, the company’s CEO has been reluctant to fire workers, with the last large-scale round of redundancies taking place in 2008 at the time of the economic crash. During the 2022-2023 layoff season, Intel reportedly cut hundreds of jobs, while Nvidia kept all its workers onboard, offering reduced salaries and higher stock awards instead. The problem is that Nvidia’s stock is up by around 1,400% over the past five years, and around 240% this year to date, thanks to a huge surge in orders of chips powering new AI tools. Nvidia has arguably benefited more from artificial intelligence than rival chipmakers like AMD and Intel, and long-standing workers see this as an opportunity to stockpile shares and watch them grow, leaving them with little motivation to put in the work. The company is also slated for having a pretty hands-off management style, making it difficult for execs to identify and address problems like complacency."

Liberals spending on social-media influencers: why? - "Health Canada, Public Health Agency of Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada are all tapping influencers, or people on social-media who have built large audiences and sometimes have a reputation for expertise on certain topics."
Government influence operations are only bad when the left disapprove

Opinion | Alex Karp, Nicholas Zamiska: U.S. tech companies should help build AI weaponry - The Washington Post - "The great-powers calculus that has helped prevent another world war might also change quickly. But the supremacy of U.S. military power has undoubtedly helped guard the peace, fragile as it might be. A commitment to maintaining such supremacy, however, has become increasingly unfashionable in the West. And deterrence, as a doctrine, is at risk of losing its moral appeal... for a nation that holds itself to a higher moral standard than its adversaries when it comes to the use of force, technical parity with an enemy is insufficient. A weapons system in the hand of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will only act as an effective deterrent if it is far more powerful than the capability of an opponent that would not hesitate to kill the innocent.  The trouble is that the young Americans who are most capable of building AI systems are often also most ambivalent about working for the military. In Silicon Valley, engineers have turned their backs, unwilling to engage with the mess and moral complexity of geopolitics. While pockets of support for defense work have emerged, most funding and talent continue to stream toward the consumer. The engineering elite of our country rush to raise capital for video-sharing apps and social media platforms, advertising algorithms and shopping websites. They don’t hesitate to track and monetize people’s every movement online, burrowing their way into our lives. But many balk when it comes to working with the military. The rush is simply to build. Too few ask what ought to be built and why... Yet the peace that those in Silicon Valley who are opposed to working with the military enjoy is made possible by that same military’s credible threat of force... What’s most concerning is that a generation’s disenchantment with and disinterest in our country’s collective defense has led to a massive redirection of resources — intellectual and financial — toward sating the needs of consumer culture. The diminishing demands we place on the technology sector to produce products of enduring and collective value are ceding too much power to the whims of the market. As David Graeber, who taught anthropology at Yale and the London School of Economics, observed in a 2012 essay in the Baffler, “The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue.” The technology world’s drift toward the concerns of the consumer has helped reinforce a certain escapism — Silicon Valley’s instinct to ignore the important issues we face as a society in favor of the trivial and ephemeral. Challenges ranging from national defense and violent crime to education reform and medical research have appeared to many people in the technology industry to be too intractable, thorny and politically fraught to be worth addressing...  outrage from the crowd has trained leaders and investors across the technology industry to avoid any hint of controversy or disapproval. But their reticence comes with significant costs. Many investors in Silicon Valley and legions of extraordinarily talented engineers simply set the hard problems aside. A generation of ascendant founders say they actively seek out risk, but when it comes to deeper investments in societal challenges, caution often prevails. Why wade into geopolitics when you can build another app? And build apps they have done. A proliferation of social media empires systematically monetizes and channels the human desire for status and recognition.  For its part, the foreign policy establishment has repeatedly miscalculated when dealing with China, Russia and others, believing that economic integration can be sufficient to undercut their leaders’ domestic support and diminish their interest in military escalation abroad. The failure of the Davos consensus was to abandon the stick in favor of the carrot alone. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping of China and other authoritarian leaders have wielded power in a way that political leaders in the West might never understand... Pacifism satisfies our instinctive empathy for the powerless. It also relieves us of the need to navigate among the difficult trade-offs that the world presents... It would be a mistake, and indeed a form of moral condescension, to systematically equate powerlessness with piousness. The subjugated and subjugators are equally capable of grievous sin.  We do not advocate a thin and shallow patriotism — a substitute for thought and genuine reflection about the merits of our nation as well as its flaws. We only want America’s technology industry to keep in mind an important question — which is not whether a new generation of autonomous weapons incorporating AI will be built. It is who will build them and for what purpose."

Foghorn Leghorn Lecture / The Emperor Triumphant / Fantasy vs Reality

Foghorn Leghorn to dead shooter with police and military looking over him: "I say, BOY, I say, ya call yourself a HITMAN? You couldn't HIT the broad side of a barn, BOY! YA MISSED HIM! I tell ya, the kid two cents short of a nickel. YOU HAD ONE JOB, BOY, AND LOOK AT YA! Dead as a doornail. COVERED IN MORE RED THAN A MAGA HAT, BOY."

*Recreation of Trump Triumphant with Stormtroopers, Darth Vader and Royal Guards, with Imperial Flag*

Fantasy: *Trump shaking hands with Hitler*
Reality: *Trump with Kippah/Yarmulke at the Western Wall*

Links - 26th July 2024 (1 - General Wokeness)

Column: Canada's immigration crisis : r/canada - "Because our human rights code gives all kids the right to a public education. Due to “full inclusion” models and the complete elimination of special education funding/classes, almost all kids are mainstreamed in the same room. When they are all placed together essentially the special education or esl child’s rights to an education trump all of the other children’s right to a safe school environment because one kid can derail a room. One non verbal autistic kid throwing a stapler in a grade 7 class calls for a class evacuation. This can happen every day. The entire class waits in the hall for the student to finish trashing the class. Then they go back in and clean up. On repeat. Every day.  Also An ESL kid takes a ton of the teachers time and often is disruptive because they aren’t used to school, or are bored because they don’t understand. When the teacher is instructing the new student on basic English and behavioural cultural norms what they aren’t doing is instructing the rest of the class.  No one fails. Everyone gets pushed to the next grade and no one is learning. I am not blaming the students here. This is not their fault.  Quite frankly due to the human rights code schools cannot legally refuse kids in the majority of cases, and there is no funding for ESL or Spec Ed programs. Kids are seldom suspended for the same reason. Parents rely on school as childcare. Parents send their kids to school and there isn’t much the principal can do. Kids know it and no longer respect authority  (There are rare cases where the principal can exclude a kid but that is in very extreme cases and so seldom. The school then often needs to suit up for human rights tribunal to battle the parents on the exclusion as it violates rights)
Edit: this is why parents are choosing Catholic school when they can. The majority of immigrants come from non catholic counties and so they aren’t allowed in under grade 8"
Clearly, the problem is not enough money

Amy Hamm: Pride tears itself apart over Israel, existence of gay conservatives - "Around 30 protesters set up a blockade in the centre of the procession route, and shouted at attendees and parade participants alike, with slogans such as, “Free Palestine” and “Pride partners with genocide!” Rather than acquiescing to a list of protester demands on the spot — as was done when Black Lives Matter demonstrators pulled a similar stunt in 2016 — Pride Toronto executive director Kojo Modeste called the whole thing off. Go home, everyone. Pride is over. Wipe those rainbows off your faces. This wasn’t the only fractious moment at Pride Toronto — where outrage over men displaying full-frontal nudity in front of children had been the story of the day, until the Coalition Against Pinkwashing showed up — and it certainly was far from the only example of internal divisions that are shearing the Pride community apart. It’s ironic: every year, the progress Pride flag seems to pick up another stripe, colour or symbol — each signalling some increasingly niche and mysterious aspect of queerdom that I suspect even old-school LGBT members are befuddled over. And yet, rather than achieving a motley utopia, Pride is falling to pieces. Under the guise of “inclusion” — and alongside the infinitely expanding acronym and flag — Pride has become politicized to the extent that it now excludes those who fall outside a narrow set of ideological beliefs. And while the country’s largest Pride organizations are flush with the cash from dozens of corporate sponsors, and even embrace straight people cosplaying as queer, actual members of the community are unceremoniously pushed aside and told they’re no longer welcome. Straight people with rainbows? In. Conservative gay or transgender people? Out. People who support the police or Israel? Also out. The litmus test for inclusion in the alphabet community’s annual festivities now seems to be one’s political views or — failing that — the ability to provide corporate sponsorship (unless you’ve got any investments in Jewish companies, that is). As Toronto’s abruptly ended parade showed, the ideological battles can’t even happen as a side conversation — internal squabbles over political purity can and will derail the entire celebration. That is not something to be proud of. A viral video from this year’s NYC Pride shows a woman, who looks like the victim of a rainbow flag factory explosion, confidently explaining to a YouTube personality — clearly a “gotcha” moment that she failed to see coming — how Pride month “means a big fu–ing deal to us.” “When did you realize that you were gay or queer,” asks the interviewer. “I’m straight,” she responds. Now, compare that straight woman’s inclusion in the annual festivities to the naked hostility shown to famous transwoman Blaire White at a Texas Pride festival this year: White, who is a political conservative, was followed by hostile attendees and security, filmed and sworn at for supporting Donald Trump. On social media, White wrote that this was her first ever experience being “trans-bashed” — at Pride, no less. “This is how a cult operates, not a group of people that represent love and inclusion,” wrote White. She’s right. How is it that a straight woman in rainbow gear has become more welcome at Pride celebrations than a transgender woman?... The Vancouver Pride Society... previously banned the Vancouver Public Library and the Vancouver Lesbian Collective from participating in official events. Why? Because the library rents public spaces to people who express political views that the Vancouver Pride Society disagrees with, and because the Vancouver Lesbian Collective insists that — brace yourself — lesbians are attracted to females (as in, the ones who don’t have penises). The only community members I know of who are still interested in attending Pride festivities do so out of morbid fascination with the fringe elements, or, in the style of Blaire White, to be subversive: a thought criminal amongst one’s would-be persecutors. Pride’s “inclusion” only extends to those who pass a political purity test, which — as the Coalition Against Pinkwashing demonstrated — becomes more rigorous and exacting every year."
"Inclusion" leads to more division
It's not about the Queer community, but the left wing agenda

Adam Zivo: Militant LGBTQ activists ill-equipped to handle backlash - "New polling data shows that support for LGBTQ rights is dropping precipitously in Canada — and while many queer activists will inevitably blame the far right for this development, the fact is that they themselves helped sabotage their own public support. Their abrasiveness and militancy has alienated the public, and though a strategic shift is needed, I fear that community leaders will fail to understand this until it is too late. According to this year’s edition of the Ipsos LGBTQ+ Pride Report, which polled adults in 26 countries, support for queer rights has decreased across the globe since 2021. Several metrics suggest that the starkest changes occurred in Canada. This year, only 49 per cent of Canadian respondents believed that people should be open about their orientation or gender identity (down 12 points from 2021), while support for LGBTQ people publicly kissing or holding hands fell to 40 per cent (down 8 points). Fewer Canadians want to see openly gay or bisexual athletes (50 per cent, down 11 points) or more LGBTQ characters on screens (34 per cent, down 10 points). Canadians have been souring not just on visibility, but legal rights, too. Only 54 per cent of respondents supported LGBTQ-inclusive anti-discrimination laws that guarantee equal employment, housing and educational opportunities. That number was 63 per cent just three years ago. And while same sex marriage and child adoption remains popular — at 75 and 70 per cent, respectively — these rights also saw concerning drops in support (down 7 and 11 points)... Broadly speaking, you can conceptualize activism in two ways: war or public relations. Both approaches can be productive, depending on the context. Radical activism, which tends to be warlike, was useful at the advent of the modern LGBTQ movement. The 1969 Stonewall riots helped queer people burst into the public sphere, for example. Yet the long march towards equality was primarily driven by activists who operated more like publicists or diplomats, and who cleverly built empathy for their cause. Though riots are often romanticized, you cannot build enduring social support by throwing bricks... It helped, too, that this style of activism operated on liberal notions of social justice, wherein individual liberty, neutral civil rights and equality under the law were heavily promoted. Such a framework made it easier for skeptics to accept the LGBTQ community, because it implied that no one was getting special treatment and that mutual non-interference between competing social groups was an end goal. But then same sex marriage was finally legalized across the entire United States in 2015. Having won their ultimate symbol of legitimacy, the more conventional members of the LGBTQ community, including a large part of the professional class, drifted away from activism. The voices left behind were marginalized, militant and resentful of their abandonment. As their influence within the LGBTQ community rapidly grew, they radicalized institutions and supplanted the rhetoric of “love is love” with the more antagonistic “Queer as in f–k you.” Concurrently, western social justice advocacy was, at the macro level, being poisoned by a new moral-political framework, popularly referred to as “woke culture,” which prioritized sanctimony over persuasion. The progressive victories of the 2010s seemingly convinced many activists that their enemies were on the cusp of being permanently vanquished, for they assumed that history irreversibly marches forward. This intoxicated them. Overconfident and arrogant, they decided that there was no need to persuade others — in fact, non-believers should be grateful for the opportunity to join the coming revolution. “It’s not my job to educate you,” was a common refrain of the late 2010s, muttered by activists who harshly policed allies through strict rules and hierarchies, and demanded compensation for the “emotional labour” of advancing their own rights. Why these people felt clever for raising new barriers against the dissemination of LGBTQ-inclusive ideas will forever remain a mystery to me — though I suspect many of them saw their own morality as a kind of social capital which they could hoard. To make a religious comparison, they stopped behaving like humble evangelists preaching in the town square, and instead became high priests who jealously guarded access to the scripture. While their bullying behaviour suppressed public criticism of progressive causes, it did nothing to address people’s underlying beliefs. Denied outlets to ask questions or discuss concerns, public discontent grew more pressurized, like a cyst filling with pus. Even moderate progressives, queer or not, silently bottled themselves... younger Americans grew far less comfortable with the LGBTQ community toward the late 2010s. The 2019 Accelerating Acceptance report found a considerable drop in respondents between the ages of 18 and 35 who could be considered “allies” (meaning that these people expressed very high levels of comfort with LGBTQ interactions). Between 2016 and 2018, the rate of “allies” in this population dropped from 63 to 45 per cent — the collapse was catastrophic among young men, whose “allyship” rate almost halved. But GLAAD never published age breakdowns after that report, making further generational analysis impractical. However, the aforementioned Ipsos polling data showed that male Gen Z respondents were less supportive than their Millennial counterparts with respect to many LGBTQ issues, suggesting that the trends of the late 2010s have only continued. By 2020, the anti-LGBTQ backlash was finally noticed by the mainstream. Faced with a complex problem, progressive voices simplistically blamed the “far right” — an amorphous enemy which they failed to define, and which provided a convenient explanation for seemingly all of society’s ills. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, emphasized the toxicity of the Trump administration — even though the backlash was seemingly more pronounced among younger generations, where Trump was least popular... instead, queer activists only urge more militancy. Their revolutionary theatre is too emotionally satisfying. Their echo chambers, unassailable. Their grandiose pretensions conceal a certain fecklessness — for they claim that they want to secure their rights by any means necessary, but consider conversations with outsiders too exhausting. They take credit for the LGBTQ community’s victories, but accept no blame for its losses... hile there is growing dissent within the LGBTQ community, critics of radical activism are locked out of queer institutions and largely ignored by the mainstream media."
Clearly, this has nothing to do with left wing overreach

Adam Zivo: LGBTQ activists need to tone down the anger - "I was eager to spotlight Ashton-Cirillo because of her capacity to challenge stereotypes about trans people. Articles built around “trans person to do X” are a tired trope, but that’s because they often spotlight individuals who exist in trans-friendly industries and therefore aren’t actually that transgressive or interesting. I yawn at articles about trans fashion models, for example, because it’s unsurprising that that industry is LGBTQ-friendly. But Ashton-Cirillo’s story was something different and wild — she was putting her life on the line to work in Ukraine, a country where trans people aren’t really a thing. My editor at the Washington Examiner, Tom Rogan, said yes to the story without hesitation. Ashton-Cirillo spent months reporting from the front lines, staying in Kharkiv when everyone else fled. She delivered food to starving villages that few were brave enough to visit —  all while being inundated with online death threats. Grizzled military men in the city smiled while reminiscing about her earnestness, modesty and commitment —  none cared about her being trans. It helps that Ashton-Cirillo tries not to let being trans define her, and frames her work as the affirmation of American values, such as individual freedom and democracy. She’s a conservative-friendly example for trans rights — patriotic, brave and non-identitarian. Though a Democrat, she engages with people of all backgrounds — hence why she was happy to be featured in the Examiner even if she considers some of its content to be hateful. Together, we tried to show that human decency can transcend the culture wars. This shocked some LGBTQ activists — but it’s a lesson in how the culture wars can be cooled down when approached with open-mindedness."
Stereotypes are only bad when they threaten the left wing agenda

Universities Should Promote Rigorous Discourse, Not Stifle It - "The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an advocacy article that attacks academic freedom and urges stifling contentious campus debates. Specifically, Evan Mullen, Eric J. Topol, and Abraham Verghese urge universities to “speak out publicly” and issue official institutional opinions about public controversies involving its professors “when it concludes that a faculty member’s opinion could cause public harm.”   The NEJM authors write in the context of Stanford University refusing to institutionally condemn the arguments made by one of its scholars, Dr. Scott Atlas, when he advised the Trump administration on COVID policies in the early days of the pandemic. The authors, one of whom is a physician trainee (Mullen) and another the former vice chair of education (Verghese) at Stanford, are university colleagues of Atlas, as is one of the authors of this essay (Bhattacharya). They claim that Atlas’ publicly expressed skepticism of masking as an effective prophylactic against infection and his belief that lockdowns and school closures would cause more harm than good were so potentially harmful that Stanford itself – as an institution – should have condemned Atlas’ opinions.  Why? It wasn’t as if some of his colleagues didn’t criticize Atlas. Indeed, more than a hundred Stanford professors and physicians wrote publicly opposing his advice. The letter’s signatories also pushed a vote through the Stanford Faculty Senate in November 2020 condemning Dr. Atlas, using quasi-religious language to declare his positions “anathema.” But that wasn’t enough, apparently, because “institutional silence may be interpreted as tacit approval.”   Controversy between professors is the norm at the frontiers of science. It is utterly unsurprising that there would be discord over the proper policy to follow in the wake of a pandemic featuring a new virus, with great uncertainty about its epidemiological and biological aspects. In the intervening years, Dr. Atlas’ positions in 2020 on school closures and mask mandates have been proven legitimate, demonstrating the wisdom of Stanford not taking a position as an institution.             Meanwhile, in another attack on academic freedom, Harvard’s Dean of Social Science issued a call in the Daily Crimson to punish professors who criticize the university, “A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors,” wrote Lawrence D. Bobo, “be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government to intervene in Harvard’s affairs.” In other words, what happens at Harvard should stay at Harvard...   First, there is the problem of how the institutional “official” opinions would be determined. The NEJM authors suggest establishing a large committee made up of members with a wide array of expertise and the ability to obtain outside opinions as circumstances warrant.  But such committees would quickly turn into ideologically stacked decks, particularly given the overwhelming progressive political dominance among professors and administrators in most major universities. After all, who would decide those selected to be committee members – and perhaps even more importantly, decide who should excluded? Why, the same administrators and faculty department chairs who have crafted the kind of sclerotic homogeneity that typifies contemporary university faculties.  The proposal calls to mind an earlier incident in scientific history. In response to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, in 1931, a hundred German professors wrote a book attacking his idea. Einstein’s famous response? If his theory was wrong, it would not take the word of 100 scientists but rather just one fact. Scientific disputes and academic disagreements are properly handled in this way, not by institutional authority but by reason, data, and experimentation. The freedom to speak and disagree is essential to science.   Second, if universities took “official positions” on matters of public controversy and on-campus debate, it would stifle the expression of unpopular or heterodox opinions by faculty that disagreed with officially sanctioned opinions and materially chill the free and open exchange of ideas required for academic freedom to thrive. Even tenured faculty with job security would be reluctant to disagree with the university’s institutional position openly. After all, a university can punish a professor in many ways besides losing a position. These include restricting lab time, making professors teach undesired classes, social shunning, and other means to create a hostile work environment. And what chance would there be for untenured faculty or adjunct professors with little job security to contest the university’s institutional opinion? Slim and none... why should university leadership be able to punish their on-campus critics? The only thing accomplished would be to isolate them from institutional and public accountability. That officials at both Stanford and Harvard have publicly advocated unwarranted restrictions in academic discourse points to the distressing possibility that the leadership of our elite universities desires to operate under an opaque shield of unaccountability."
"Harm" is anything that threatens the left wing agenda. Academic freedom is only for the left

i/o on X - "There are rarely simple explanations for complex social and cultural phenomena. The Great Awokening mostly organically formed and then spread from a constellation of ideas, social forces, group interests, and events, including:
— civil rights law
— feminization of institutions
— critical theories
— the rise in social media
— the logical extension of the liberal impulse
— left's dominance of all major opinion-shaping institutions
— reaction to Trump
— social status signaling (especially among the highly-educated)
— demographic change
— late-wave feminism
— 2010s Tumblr
— some strains of PoMo
— emerging forms of modern global capitalism
— the replacement of the class wars with identity wars on the progressive-left as the prog-left became mostly a movement led and populated by the more affluent and educated
— the rise in mental health issues (especially among white females)
— the normalization of therapy culture
— the contradictions in late-stage Christianity and the overall decline of religion and the need to fill the "god hole"
— the culturally-enforced and pathological persistence of white guilt
— the radicalization of curriculum in education degree programs
— spread of administrative DEI
— the psychological effects of "shocks to the system" (e.g., 9/11, 2007 economic collapse) on the young
— the equalitarian ethos of American life (e.g., there can be no innate differences between groups)
— the failure of the intellectual right to produce compelling countervailing ideas
— the rise of social and professional cancellation as a weapon to control dissenting views"

Meme - Rusty @LieutenantRusty: "Now, I'm not gonna tell anyone how to run their RPG, but I will say that of all the disabled folks I've gamed with, not a goddamn one of them fantasized about being disabled.  They lived that shit. Every day.   If your version of escapism is fantasizing about being handicapped, you're a fetishist, and that's just weird."
"Accepting the existence of magic in a fantasy setting should not be easier than accepting the existence of disabled people in a fantasy setting."

Chase Lees 🇨🇦 on X - "Personally, in every single "fantasy" I have or rpg I play, I don't give my player the disability I have. I (and 99.99% of disabled people) do not want to go through the pain and hassle of disability in a media meant for escapism."
Rusty on X - "Myself, I have a rich inner fantasy life where I have all my bits and pieces back. Why the hell would I escape to a place where I'm *still* fucking broken?"

Meme - "The D&D Differently-Abled Adventurer
Had to wait until 2021 for rules
Suffers no penalties for rules for being disabled, might as well be able-bodied
HP system doesn't even allow for crippling injury
Ridiculous modern-style combat wheelchair
Gets wheelchair accessible dungeons, despite flying wheelchair
Could easily get magical healing
Chooses to be disabled because that's all he has to make him interesting
The GURPS Cripple
Has lots of disabled friends, due to crippling injuries
Rules support since 1986
Crude prosthetics
Supreme grappler due to ground-fighting perk
Harsh penalties for fighting while seated - learns techniques to offset them
Spends points from disabilites on increased Arm ST
Wheelchairs not invented until Tech-Level 5, uses realistic wheeled platform"

Meme - Daddy Warpig @DaddyWarpig: "Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, AND Ranger.  🤦‍♂️"
"LESSER RESTORATION
2nd level abjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Target: A creature
Components: V S
Duration: Instantaneous
Classes: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Ranger
You touch a creature and can end either one disease or one condition afflicting it. The condition can be blinded, deafened, paralyzed, or poisoned.
paralyzed"
Misa on Wheels @MisaonWheels: "Accepting the existence of magic in a fantasy setting should not be easier than accepting the existence of disabled people in a fantasy setting."

Meme - "Dungeons & Dragons kicks off 2021 with its first wheelchair-accessible dungeon
Candlekeep Adventures includes 17 adventures from 19 different designers"
"Pray tell, why in the ever loving fuck would a labyrinth of traps and monsters wish to be MORE accessible?"
"they dont want to be an ableist trump supporter"
"gotta let the peasants have their shot, adventurers make up 1% of the population yet have 80% of the wealth. it's time to defund the adventurer's guild, how many stories of murderhobos killing peasants do you need before realizing adventurers aren't on your side, bootlicker"
"Dungeons now are haunted house rides instead of, well, dungeons"
"The dungeon is either a trap or an ancient loading dock. Possibly a submerged skatepark."

Incoming human rights chief said 'terror is not an irrational strategy' - "“The attempts to have Mr. Dattani — the first Muslim and racialized person appointed to this position — vacate his seat without due process is deeply concerning,” the group said in an open letter sent to Justice Minister Arif Virani... “While the allegations against Mr. Dattani are concerning, this campaign against him highlights the heightened level of scrutiny he, like many Canadians, faces because of his faith and ethnic background"... Dattani spoke again on a similar theme when he delivered a presentation on “Terrorism and the Targeting of Civilians under International Law” to the Muslim Research Forum. “Contrary to conventional wisdom (which is far more convention than it is wisdom), terror is not an irrational strategy pursued solely by fundamentalists with politically and psychologically warped visions of a new political, religious or ideological order,” Dattani wrote in a description of his talk posted to the forum’s website. “It is a rational and well-calculated strategy that is pursued with surprisingly high success rates.” In August 2014, Dattani also signed an open letter that was drafted by Richard Falk, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories. The letter condemned Israel’s military operation against Hamas in 2014 that was sparked after the terror group kidnapped and burned alive three hitchhiking teenagers... Shortly after his public letter, Falk told Democracy Now! that Hamas embodies the “spirit of resistance” and said the group’s “politics have been directed toward long-term peaceful coexistence with Israel.” Dattani told National Post last week that he is the “target of unfounded allegations” and stands “resolutely behind my record.”... a Canadian who attended the University of Calgary at the same time as Dattani, said the incoming CHRC head regularly advocated for the boycott of Israel. “Birju used to be, back in the day, just kind of caustic, a provocateur. Instigating. That’s kind of what he did. I was amazed to discover that he ended up having a career in human rights the way that he has,” said the alumnus, who spoke on the condition of anonymity."
The power of intersectionality!
Of course, they need to pretend a white Christian would not be fired already

Eli Steele on X - ".@ChicagoMayor: "Y'all look, white supremacy is real- I'm going to say that one more time." Brandon Johnson launches a hardcore identity politics rant, blaming The Man for his city's miseries. What else to expect from a man who always seeks to exploit race for power."

Meme - "THE CHRISTIANS ARE GONNA TAKE OVER THE GOVERNMENT AND IMPOSE THEIR RELIGION ON EVERYONE *Public building with rainbow colours for Pride and Black Lives Matter flag*"

Meme - frogwave @____ribbit: "People avoid listening to racist ideas like some religious person will avoid looking at naked women. They fear that they will be tempted to commit sin. Liberalism has unofficially replaced Christianity in the West"

Meme - Wesley Yang @wesyang: "Everyone knows this is moronic.   Nobody can stop its propagation through every institution that incubates the American professional class."
Nicki Neily @nickineily: "When doctors who graduated from Duke Medical School show up late to your scheduled surgeries — just know that they’re doing their part to dismantle the white supremacy culture behind “timeliness.”"
"Duke Medical School claims 'timeliness, 'individualism is part of 'White supremacy culture'. 'Race and racism is a regular component of American society; Duke Medical School's strategic plan said"

Meme - Deep Squats, Shallow Thoughts @wolfstrength: "“Why don’t people trust scientists and experts anymore? Do they really think they can ‘do their own research,’ and get it right compared to my medical degree?  The scientists and experts:"
"Expecting people to be on time is part of 'white supremacy culture,' Duke Medical School claims"
"Before mocking people for turning to non mainstream sources of info and bemoaning anti-intellectualism, maybe do some reflection on why the scientists, experts, and intellectuals have inserted blatant political activism into their ostensible fields of expertise, and the expected effect that has had on people trusting them to tell the truth.
'Over 1,000 health professionals sign a letter saying, Don't shut down protests using coronavirus concerns as an excuse'"
If you notice that the left has compromised and corrupted key institutions which are now no longer reliable, you're a dangerous far right conspiracy theorist and spreader of misinformation for noticing

Links - 25th July 2024 (2 - Trans Mania)

Jason Kantor on X - "Earlier this year I worked with a 16 year old teen (a boy) who expressed to me that he wanted to change his gender   During one of our sessions he just blurted out that he had been considering it for the last few weeks and he thought that maybe the root of his struggles were because of his gender   And that changing would perhaps fix all of his problems   I didn’t probe much because it wasn’t my place and its a sensitive area so I could have easily said something that could’ve been misconstrued or gotten me in trouble so I told him to speak with his therapist and mother because they would be able to help more than I could   He had an unfortunate upbringing that included lots of trauma and his father was not in the picture   He was depressed, anxious, and struggling with his executive functions - which is what I was meant to help him with   What I found most interesting about his situation was that for the past year he had cycled through a lot of different “identities”
•He went vegan for a bit
•He joined a socialist / marxist club
•He was really obsessed with a particular video game (can’t remember which - it was really niche)
•He was part of an environmentalist group which tried to combat climate change
He would get super into one of these groups, completely immerse himself in it with every fiber of his being, spend every waking moment obsessing over it, and then it would come to an end and he would move on to the next thing   It goes without saying… I’m no expert but… part of me wonders how much of him wanting to change his gender was more tied in his trauma and wanting something to help him escape that rather than actually having gender issues   And if thats true, even to some degree, I wonder how many other kids/teens are experiencing that and conflate it with wanting to change their gender   There is just so much nuance and gray area when it comes to this topic and we should be able to have a civil, open dialogue, before kids or teens make a decision that will impact them for the rest of their lives
(he never went through with changing his gender)"
Trying to treat mental health problems with left wing prescriptions. But then, they say they don't want therapy but communism

EXCLUSIVE: Cal State"Gender" Academic Inspired Pedophilic Fantasy On Castrating, Enslaving Young Boys - "a Professor Emeritus at California State University and a top consultant to the world’s leading transgender health authority directly contributed to an erotic story featuring themes of the graphic mutilation and sexual slavery of children.   In 2022, Reduxx exposed a number of academics for their role in a disturbing website known as the Eunuch Archive, a long-standing forum which hosts nearly 10,000 “erotic” stories of an extreme sadomasochistic nature. In addition to hosting the fantasy material, a discussion forum exists to provide support and community to men who identify as “eunuchs,” and seek to be or are already castrated.  The investigation into the Eunuch Archive began after it was directly referenced in a document drafted by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an international body which sets the standards for transgender healthcare. In a draft of their Standards of Care 8, WPATH included a chapter on a “eunuch gender identity,” which it defined as men who “wish to eliminate masculine physical features, masculine genitals, or genital functioning.”...   Though members of the deranged forum attempted to remain anonymous, Reduxx was able to unmask some of the top contributors and administrators, learning that at least three of them were academics with direct ties to WPATH.  One, Richard J. Wassersug, has for over 20 years used the alias “Eunuchunique”on the forum. Wassersug was an Honorary professor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences at the University of British Columbia, but has also been affiliated with Dalhousie and La Trobe Universities.  Another, Krister H. Willette, who has been active in the community since 1998, uses the screen name “Kristoff.” While a third, and arguably the most well-regarded member of the forum, was revealed to be Thomas W. Johnson, a professor emeritus at California State University-Chico who has lectured extensively on gender dysphoria and “expanding the transgender umbrella.” Johnson utilized the moniker “Jesus” on the Eunuch Archive and registered with the forum in 2001.   While all three men have direct connections to WPATH and contributed to papers and conferences organized by the association, documents provided as evidence in an ongoing court case have recently revealed that Johnson, the chapter lead for WPATH’s “eunuch” update in the Standards of Care 8, had apparently attempted to suppress internal concerns about the promotion of a ‘eunuch gender identity’.  This revelation comes just as Reduxx has now obtained confirmation that Johnson was directly participating in ghostwriting disturbing fantasies about castrating boys under his anonymous screen name.  One notable example is a story titled “Larry,” which is prefaced as being an “original nightmare by Jesus.” The story is written in an imaginary future where the law allows any adult to “sell himself or herself, or any parent to sell a child over the age of 10.”   The story’s narrator is a pedophilic slave trader who buys “attractive” children from destitute mothers following the abolishment of government assistance. While employing heavily racist tropes, the narrator purchases the titular character, a 10-year-old Black child, from his impoverished mother... using his real name, Johnson has become known for his influence in the push to normalize “eunuch identities.” But his efforts have not been met without some resistance in the medical community, even amongst the WPATH members themselves.  Newly released internal records show that many WPATH members opposed the inclusion of the “eunuch” chapter in the most recent Standards of Care. The records were presented in the legal dispute Boe v. Marshall, taking place in the District Court of Alabama, which seeks to prohibit the medical ‘transitioning’ of minors... The message goes on to defend the Eunuch chapter of the SOC-8 by citing research conducted among members of an anonymous sadomasochistic castration fetish forum. This research, the email’s author notes, were published by WPATH within the International Journal of Transgenderism.  The first paper, published in 2010, establishes “the development of standards of care for individuals with a male-to-eunuch gender identity disorder.” The second paper, dated 2016, calls for “recognition of gender variants outside the binary in WPATH Standards of Care.”  However, despite the stated objections shared internally, the Eunuch chapter was included in the final version of the SOC-8.  Additionally, when WPATH released the SOC-8 in September 2022, the guidelines had done away with specific age restrictions on medical ‘transitioning’ entirely, and reduced the age at which youth could potentially receive “puberty-blocking” drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries."
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again

Brianna Wu on X - "Real talk: I think a lot of people would have a better opinion of trans people if trans people on social media were not so consistently mean, condescending and abusive."

Meme - Daisy Strongin @DaisyIsNotHere: "If only I could somehow go back in time to 2018 and show myself these photos. Those are are not happy tears. This was her very first feeding. 40 minutes old. I know breastfeeding does not work for every woman, but the hopelessness of my situation is hitting me hard this time."
superX @ChapterXVI_CA13: "Why weren't you able to breastfeed? What was the cause?"
Daisy Strongin: "I went insane and had my breasts cut off"
Jeff @JeffNeezIsBack: "Pre-emptive for breast cancer?"
Daisy Strongin: "Worse. Transgenderism."

Meme - Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 @CathyYoung63: "This ... actually kinda goes to what a number of feminists have been saying about "gender ideology" being fundamentally sexist Imagine if a conservative had said that women warriors weren't really women"
🦖Obsolesence @Obsolesence: "According to the Canadian Museum of History women don't use axes, and if they did they weren't female. And here we see how the country has got itself into the hole it's currently in. 🤪"
"Although 2SLGBTQI+ is amodern term, archaeologists have observed patterns in how men and women were buried. For example, axes are usually found with skeletons identified by archaeologists as "male." But recent reinterpretations of some graves - such as "female" skeletons found with axes - contradict those patterns. These graves suggest that ancient people understood that sex, sexuality and gender identity are more complicated than simply "male" and "female.""

Meme - "Anonymous said
You don't seem to understand: trans women do not have the institutional power to rape cis women. If a trans woman forces a cis woman to have sex with her, that is not rape, and it can never be rape. If anything, that's a positive thing, since the trans girls are getting the sex that cis women have cruelly denied them. And if it happens to underage cis girls, it could help them discover a new gender identity."

Cbucksrules on X - "Homosexuals: "Transgenderism is a mental illness".
Trans cult: "This is what they said about homosexuals back in the day. How dare you do to others what was done to you?"
Homosexuals: That's because in our case is wasn't true. It is true of transgender people. Just like sex changes in clown fish is true for that species but not true for our species.
Homosexuality isn't a mental illness.   Transgenderism, body dysphoria and dysmorphia are mental illnesses.  Clown fish can change sex.  Humans can't change sex.  See how this works?  Something that is true in some cases doesn't automatically make it true for others."
Clearly, if you had your wrongly conviction overturned, you must support all convicted criminals having their convictions overturned, or you are a hateful hypocrite

Biden Judicial Nominee Sent Trans Male Rapist to Female Prison, Arguing Safety Concerns Were Overblown. Now, Sources Say He is Exposing Himself to Inmates. - "A judge nominated by President Joe Biden to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Sarah Netburn, is facing questions from lawmakers after recommending that a transgender, twice-convicted male sex offender be placed in a female prison.  At the time, the judge, Sarah Netburn, dismissed concerns that the inmate's presence there would pose a threat to incarcerated women.   But two sources tell the Washington Free Beacon that the inmate, William McClain, who goes by July Justine Shelby, allegedly exposed himself to female inmates. According to Debra Nizza, a former Carswell inmate released in 2016 who remains in communication with female inmates at Carswell federal women's prison in Texas, an inmate told her that McClain pulled his penis from his pants before a group of female inmates. Nizza told the Free Beacon that an inmate related to her that Shelby told the women his penis was "intact" and still functional before wagging it at the women.  Nizza's secondhand account was independently confirmed by David Hogue, an attorney with the Arkansas-based law firm Hogue Corbitt & Ward, who represents one of the inmates... Netburn made the recommendation over the objections of federal prison officials, stating that concerns his presence would be "traumatizing and possibly dangerous" were "overblown."...   The harassment was reported to prison officials who briefly moved McClain to an isolation unit, according to both Nizza and Hogue. By June 26, however, he was back in the general population...  the facility offers little privacy for women who may want to avoid male inmates. The cells contain four beds and do not have doors, and residents of one cell can see others walking to the toilets and showers...   Moving men into women's prisons and funding their sex-change surgeries has been a priority of progressive activist groups such as Lambda Legal and the Transgender Law Center, both funded by billionaires including George Soros, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Those groups pushed for federal regulations, passed in 2012, to allow cross-sex prison housing. They advocated for—and are defending in court—a California law that lets men move into women's facilities based solely on their gender identification.  Biden ordered federal prisons in 2022 to prioritize transgender inmates' "health and safety" when making housing decisions, even as data show a high rate of trans-identifying males are sex offenders. The U.K. Ministry of Justice reported in 2019 that nearly 60 percent of its male-born transgender inmates were convicted of at least one sexual offense, compared with 3.3 percent of the incarcerated female population and 17 percent of the male population.  Documents from California's prison agency showed in 2022 that one-third of the trans-identifying men seeking entry to female facilities were registered sex offenders.   California taxpayers since 2017 have spent more than $4 million on surgical sex changes and cosmetic "gender-affirming" enhancements, such as laser hair removal, for inmates"

Meme - J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling: "Crossdressing men aren't female. He calls himself trans precisely because he's male. It's right there in the terms and conditions."
"Kaz Self, a Labour councillor for Southmead, is Bristol's first female councillor to have been elected while openly trans"
The same people who claim that sex and gender are different and that only ignorant people don't know the difference don't know that nowadays you can have females with a male sex

Teachers who use wrong pronouns could face legal challenges, unions warn - "England’s long-awaited first trans guidance for schools was published for consultation in December, in response to an increase in the number of children questioning their gender... A government source said: “The NASUWT is finding problems where they don’t exist. The guidance is rooted in the Equality Act but also other legal obligations schools must meet, including safeguarding, information keeping and premises regulations.   “Fundamentally, the NASUWT has bought into the dangerous ideology of self-ID pushed by the likes of Stonewall and Mermaids. This is exactly why the government’s guidance exists - to give teachers who have been abandoned by their unions a clear set of principles to abide by.”"

Labour moves to ban puberty blockers permanently - "The appointment of Anneliese Dodds as the minister for women and equalities sparked a row this week, with Lesbian Labour, which claims to represent “the voices of lesbians in the Labour Party”, saying Ms Dodds “doesn’t get it”.  JK Rowling, Martina Navratilova and other feminist campaigners hit out at Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Ms Dodds, who has previously said there are many definitions of a woman.  The decision to pursue a permanent ban on puberty blockers is one of the first decisive steps on trans issues made by the new Government, which is keen to fully implement the findings of the independent Cass Review.  Dr Hilary Cass, the paediatrician who led the review, has said the drugs may permanently disrupt the brain maturation of adolescents, potentially rewiring neural circuits that cannot be reversed. Her review urged giving children “time to think” before sending them down an irreversible path because people were changing their minds up until the age of 25. It led to the NHS stopping under-18s being seen by adult clinics and given cross-sex hormones... The NHS halted all prescriptions of puberty blockers with a view to starting a clinical trial, but there were fears about the number of children accessing the blockers via private online clinics such as Gender GP, which is based in Singapore."

Dr Jordan B Peterson on X - "12 Rules for Monster Moms:
1. Torture your child until he or she is miserable and intolerable.
2. Seduce him or her into adopting a trendy new identity with false promises of love.
3. Proclaim how wonderful you are for  loving your son or daughter despite the burden they have now become.
4. Collect martyr kudos from your circle of idiot friends while they disparage you behind your back.
5. Yell victim loudly when anyone dares object.
6. Celebrate your allyship with the imaginary oppressed.
7. Fill your son with guilt if he protests his impending castration.
8. Scheme with your sadistic friend the butcher-surgeon until he agrees too cut the breasts off your young and could-be beautiful daughter.
9. Work with the local school to ensure that other mothers and their children follow your lead.
10. Cry often with a red face about the prejudice confronting your now-mutilated child.
11. Remind yourself frequently of your superhuman bravery and resilience.
12. Fly the Pride Flag 🏳️‍🌈 proudly and oh-so-publicly."

Expose Them on X - "Disney executive Karey Burke says her "trans son" is teaching her about the importance of trans actors in stories.  She was helping raise funds with Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a youth gender center director who says "gender essentialism is the problem.""

The frequency of personality disorders in patients with gender identity disorder - "The frequency of personality disorders was 81.4%. The most frequent personality disorder was narcissistic personality disorder (57.1%) and the least was borderline personality disorder. The average number of diagnoses was 3.00 per patient... the prevalence of personality disorders was higher among the participants, and the most frequent personality disorder was narcissistic personality disorder (57.1%), and borderline personality disorder was less common among the studied patients. "
Clearly, this doesn't show that the TRA agenda is anything other than basic human rights
No surprise that mental illnesses are correlated
Comment on trans suicide threats (claiming not that using the "right" pronoun could cost a life being a form of abusive manipulation) "most of, of not all of the loudest ones, have cluster B personality disorders and thats backed up by science.  It's really common for someone with a personality disorder to use threats of suicide as a means of manipulation."

What to Do If an Abuser Threatens Suicide - "Abusers have been known to use threats of suicide as a form of power and control. They’ll convince you that if they commit suicide, it’ll be your fault and how can you live with that? They’ll tell you that if you leave, report the abuse or otherwise don’t follow their wishes, they’ll kill themselves, and you’ll be to blame.  Threats like this are a form of emotional abuse called coercive control. Such statements aren’t cries for help. These suicidal threats are being made to manipulate you into doing what the abuser wants.    “Abusers know that by threatening suicide, they are putting their victims in a position where they have no choice but to respond with care, concern and emotional support,” says clinical psychologist Carolina Estevez...   If your partner uses threats of violence—including suicide—to control you, that’s a huge red flag, even if they never intend to follow through with the threat. Suicidal threats still might be a sign of increasing violence within a relationship...  As for your partner? Ultimately, their actions are not your responsibility.   “Although all suicide threats should be considered serious, it is not the survivor’s responsibility to save their abuser. If someone threatens suicide, it means they need a greater level of care than a partner can provide,” says licensed psychologist Kimber Shelton.   Even if your partner does decide to harm themself, know it’s not your fault."

Meme - "The people that won't call this a baby want you to call that a woman *Fetus, Rachel Levine*"

Colin Wright on X - "This person got a doctorate in psychology by interviewing 1 person—themselves!  The abstract begins: "Hello, darling. Welcome. What follows is an embodied unfurling, stutter, and flow of the intersections of my gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. It’s a tale of one body, throughout four cities, in five parts as an autoethnography."  At the end of the abstract, the author claims the primary psychology literature "does not reflect most of me and therefore has very little place here." The author therefore argues that being "expected to justify experiences, observations, and ideas by citing respectable professionals legitimized by a violent institution" is "an invalidation based in white supremacist epistemic injustice."  So this "violent institution," Point Park University, just gave this person a doctorate in a field that they completely reject and openly mock. 🤡"
A Brief History of My Gendered Body: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Trans, Queer, and Cuban Embodiment
If you have a negative view of higher education, you are just uneducated, ignorant and hateful

Graham Linehan on X - "Rest In Infamy, You Haunted Castle
I only met Neil Gaiman once... One of the unexpected advantages of being cancelled is telling people who took part in my harassment what I really think about their work... I may have asked why he wasn’t speaking out on behalf of JK Rowling, who was undergoing one of her regular cancellations for refusing to pander to the spoilt brats who loved her books but missed their meaning. A big name like his might have shifted the conversation and given her some much-needed support. He might perhaps have persuaded some of his fans to give the matter another look. This was when I assumed people like him acknowledged biological reality but worried about ‘coming out of the closet’, as it were. It took me years to realise that almost every celebrity mate of mine believed, or was pretending to believe, in the fashionable, American mind-cancer of ’gender’. But back then, I was still astonished to find that he was a carrier of the virus, the mass delusion that by sheer coincidence, turned up after the arrival of the Internet. Whether it was Bill Bailey or Neil Hannon, Robin Ince or Matt Lucas, Arthur Mathews or Jimmy Mulville, it was always the same story. A sudden cloud of amnesia would form around my celebrity mates, a real peasouper, from which they suddenly could not see why we need female-only spaces, or why unhappy teenage girls will not find a miraculous cure for their woes in a double mastectomy. Far from sharing any of my urgency in the need to stop children from being irreversibly harmed in gender clinics, they instead downplayed, deflected and dismissed. “I never ask you to join in with my animal activism” grumbled Neil Hannon on one of the occasions I begged for his support. “Couldn’t you pretend women and children are animals?” I thought. My usual trajectory during these conversations saw me shifting from gobsmacked disbelief to fury and despair. The disloyalty made me angry, but knowing my friends did not care about their own daughters, wives, sisters and mothers was, and continues to be, destabilising in the extreme. Gaiman went one step further. I can’t find the tweet, so I may be paraphrasing, but he said "I hope you're kinder if your daughter ever hopes to transition." I can think of no uglier thing to say to a parent. For girls, ‘transition’ means double mastectomies in their teens, hysterectomies in their mid-twenties, early menopause and a four times greater chance of having a heart attack than males of the same age. To have this decaying goth wish that horror on my daughter was more than I could bear. I wanted to rip his throat out. Like a pair of grappling cowboys falling off a rooftop, our fight spilled into email. I sent Gaiman this article about the Tavistock . It was clear when he wrote back that he hadn’t absorbed it Like most celebrities in this fight, he appeared to have lost the ability to read... The piece was right there, detailing exactly what was happening to the children unlucky enough to wander through the Tavistock’s doors, and he chose to repeat that disgusting thing. Why?... A few years back, I wrote about becoming a sort of Jessica Fletcher figure on Twitter . ‘Murder, She Wrote” but with paedophiles and predators. “Just as murderers seemed drawn to any location Jessica presented herself, “ I said. “My opining about women's rights and safety on Twitter appeared to attract the kind of men who can't sit still during a spelling bee.” Among my adversaries was Peter Bright, the Ars Technica writer now doing twelve years for trying to buy two children to abuse. Luckily the children didn’t exist and the parents were actually FBI agents. Our exchange was brief and concerned safeguarding. I’m sure you’re all astonished to discover that he was against it. Then there was ex-Labour MP Eric Joyce, who argued with me about the safety of mixed-sex loos in schools and was done for possessing the worst kind of child abuse images. More recently, I tangled with ‘Lexi’, who is now serving time for rape . They all had one thing in common. They couldn’t leave alone those of us who were actively opposing the trans movement's assault on safeguarding, an assault that chimed nicely with their plans for the future. Each was returning to the scene of a crime not yet committed, each picking at a scab on their own character...  During my Jessica Fletcher period (a period which continues) no-one except Gaiman ever mentioned my kids. I think he knew it would cause me distress, and the second time he said it was just a twisting of the knife. Many of my colleagues in the media joined in with the trashing of my reputation, but Gaiman went that extra mile. I believe this is because he is a sadist. I think he is a man who finds pleasure in the suffering of others, and a man who does not see women and girls as fully human."
Interesting hypothesis about why TRAs are so vicious

Australian "Trans Inclusive" Football Club With FIVE Male Players Dominates Women's Leagues After Being Accused Of Injuring Female Players - "An Australian football club for “self-identified women and non-binary people” has been dominating women’s competitions, just weeks after concerns were raised about the safety risks to actual female players. The Flying Bats Football Club in North Sydney has at least five males who identify as transgender on the team, and has previously been accused of causing career-changing injuries to female competitors... one of the five men on the women’s football team is trans activist YouTuber Riley Dennis, who was previously accused of severely injuring women while participating on another women’s team in the region. But the Flying Bats attracted even more controversy earlier this year after audio recorded during a March 20 meeting of the North Sydney Football Association was leaked... “One of our players rushed over to try to help her, she was screaming in so much pain. At that time, she made a derogatory remark to the Bats player, which we apologized for. [She was] suspended. The Bats player, nothing happened to [him].” Parisi clarified that following this incident, the female player who was injured was suspended from matches for a total of eight weeks.  Parisi further revealed that 24 women had recently withdrawn their registration with his football club as a “direct result” of the possibility of competing in a match against the males on the Flying Bats team. “They’ve all said to me, ‘Frank, we do not want to play against the Bats players.’ I’m going to say it straight, there’s men playing in a women’s competition. And that’s wrong.”... Parisi also noted that there had also been some anxiety surrounding “how implausible it had become for any team to win against the Flying Bats.”  That implausibility appears to have been accentuated over the past few weeks, as the Flying Bats has dominated the leaderboards in every single match they have had since April 7. In 10 of the 13 matches the played during this time, the all-female teams have not been able to score a single goal against the Flying Bats...   “If there was a concerted effort by teams to forfeit games against a particular opposition that would be viewed as an act of discrimination,” said Chris Salmon, Chair of the Board of Directors for NWSF."
If you don't endorse cheating and risk your physical safety, that's discrimination