Tovarich EmmyNoether

Feminist, Scientist, bloody minded woman. "Follows" means I'm interested in what you have to say, not necessarily that I agree with it.

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Last Notes

2024-12-20 21:22:39 UTC

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I think psychologically, she can't u-turn.
She took her son to have his dick cut off on his 16th birthday.
As a parent there's no coming back from that. If she ever had to admit to herself the enormity of the barbaric mutilation she'd done to her own child, she would go insane.

2024-12-20 20:00:07 UTC

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Yes, as the Dickipedia entry says (for once, correctly) they have no right of entry. So they can turn up on your doorstep. And you can tell them to piss off and shut the door on them.

2024-12-07 21:04:01 UTC

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Genius

2024-12-07 20:58:54 UTC

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'From leaking state secrets to taking leaks in the women's restroom, [she] just can't seem to get it right,' the 47-year-old congresswoman wrote on X.
😂
And dear Daily Mail, grow some fucking balls. I'm sure the original tweet said "he" - so quote what Mace actually said.

2024-12-07 20:56:20 UTC

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When child was tiny, I needed a sweatshirt saying "Yes, he does have socks. Yes, I did put them on him. He pulled them off. I replaced them. He pulled them off." With an arrow indicating where the process loops.

2024-12-07 20:53:00 UTC

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As far as I can see, they're saying "because one SE Asian culture had a deity of mercy who was male, then two thousand years later a different SE Asian culture had a deity of mercy who was female, this means the deity of mercy must be trans."
About as sensible as saying "well, one European culture had a deity of hunting, Artemis, who was female and another had a deity of hunting, Wotan, who was male, so Artemis/ Wotan is trans."
Not very bright, are they? (But then we knew that.)

2024-12-07 20:44:12 UTC

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That's my kind of door-stepping.

2024-12-07 20:33:37 UTC

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Yup, I've seen that cartoon many times, and I always nod along sadly.

2024-12-07 20:31:29 UTC

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Germany is fucked. They are going to drive their voters into the arms of the AFD (which, for the avoidance of doubt, I consider to be a bad thing).
Why do leftists (among whom I count myself) have this hideous tendency to embrace idiocy leaving the right with an open goal?

2024-12-07 20:28:21 UTC

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That school (and its education authority) are going to get hammered in the employment tribunal. They have not got a leg to stand on.
I find her views idiotic, but she has every right to be an idiot in her private life.
And the principle is so well established in connection with civil servants (teachers aren't civil servants but I can't see any basis for teaching being treated differently) that I don't think they'll have any sort of defence. (Basically, civil servants below grade 7 can engage in any political activity they want - short of a proscribed organisation - so long as they do it in their own time and don't tie it their employer. The rules are absolutely crystal clear.)

2024-12-07 20:22:09 UTC

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I feel feeble now. I was hit with the ban hammer for telling an old skool MRA (not even a TRA) to fuck off. In retrospect seems like I failed to go down in a blaze of glory.

2024-12-04 18:13:44 UTC

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Six months later still...
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_720/public/imports/Kurdish_YPG_Fighters_%2830358638660%29_1.jpg?h=048697cd&itok=DKOou5Lr

2024-12-04 18:09:52 UTC

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"I am slow to suggest gender plays a role in someone's ability to write..."
translates as
"I am a raving misogynist who will absolutely go 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds given half a chance to diss a female author even though I am a talentless git whose one and only brain cell is getting kind of lonely..."

2024-12-04 18:03:01 UTC

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Yes, I am aware of the background to Lolita.
The "wtaf" was "wtaf is that doing in a fucking toyshop, next to the playmobil?"

2024-12-04 17:54:31 UTC

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wtaf?

2024-12-04 17:45:10 UTC

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The "Mumsnet didn't exist before 2020" line is causing quite a lot of hilarity on Mumsnet.
(I was certainly on there, and being pretty Ultra - insofar as one could be within the modding rules - back then. Also, I seem to remember Barracker's "Pronouns are Rohypnol" making its first airing on there, again, way before 2020. The post got deleted which is why she had to put it on a substack.)

2024-12-04 11:51:58 UTC

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Remember this is a brilliant illustration of why the whole point is that women should be left with NOTHING for ourselves. The US has two separate powerlifting associations, one of which actually is for women (the one he's suing) and one which is twans-inclusive.
He could win all he wanted in the twans-inclusive one while handmaidens lost to him and still fawned over him.
He is CHOOSING to sue the one which is trying to hold the line.

2024-12-02 22:21:37 UTC

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Blimey, that takes me back to visits to my gran.

2024-12-02 22:05:17 UTC

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My spoken French is nowhere near as good as my reading level (used to be).

2024-12-02 22:04:35 UTC

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There should be a small corner of, I dunno, bright orange in the NW of Wales for "Fuck off with your English here, I'm only going to speak Welsh even though I speak fluent English," (except delivered in Welsh, of course).

2024-12-02 22:00:53 UTC

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Genius.

2024-12-02 21:57:12 UTC

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The eternal problem of being an English speaker anywhere touristy.
(NB, large tracts of Europe are not touristy. Even the much vaunted claim that all Germans speak fluent English is not so - get outside the major cities and this will not be the case. My German is very much at "survival" level. I can say hello and feed myself and that's about it.)

2024-12-02 21:54:50 UTC

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I can still remember the present, future and perfect tense but my imperfect would be very ropey indeed.
I used to be good enough to translate legal/ diplomatic French pretty accurately.

2024-12-02 21:53:23 UTC

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That is glorious.
(And it's one of my bugbears when TV does this for real.)

2024-12-02 21:47:30 UTC

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What have the poor aquatic beasties done to deserve being sneezed on? 😉

2024-12-02 21:45:41 UTC

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Yeah, we have at least 2 words for everything - the Germanic word and the French word (with the French word generally being the fancy-schmancy interlecktural word 😆 )
But then there may well be a 3rd, 4th or 5th word from Latin, Greek, anywhere else that takes our fancy. (Picnic, glasnost, zenith...).

2024-12-02 21:43:12 UTC

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😀
And some of the worst speakers of the lot are, sad to say, native speakers.
Among the best speakers of English I've come across are a Croatian and a Finn.
The Finn once asked me for advice in making his English better. I explained that if anything, the main giveaway was that his English was too good - he had these splendid, Ciceronian sentences with multiple subclauses - and perhaps he needed to spend more time reading The Sun to dumb things down a bit.
"Ah yes," he said "'Freddie Starr ate my hamster.'"
That was the point at which I told him to piss off and stop wasting my time.

2024-12-02 21:37:09 UTC

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Diolch.

2024-12-02 21:35:14 UTC

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I'd say that article's something of a minority opinion. Most discussions I've seen of ease/ difficulty of learning languages rate English as one of the easiest (very little grammatical complexity, huge range of natural variation in pronunciation meaning that native speakers are pretty good at deciphering "weird-sounding" versions of English).
It's also been my anecdotal experience talking to various non-native speakers I know who speak multiple languages.
I suspect a source called "English Proficiency" (which is in the business of selling English courses) may not be an unbiased source.

2024-12-02 21:16:27 UTC

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The bugger for an English speaker is that English is pretty much the easiest language in the world, so *any* other language is going to be harder.
If you can cope with the pronunciation, I think grammatically French is fairly straightforward.
German (particularly if your own dialect is north of England) is very easy to pronounce and shares the same vowel sounds and stress patterns, but the grammar is (moderately) difficult. The word order can feel quite alien to an English speaker (see Gnome's video upthread), and it's inflected (the word "the", for instance, changes not just according to grammatical gender, but according to the function the noun has in the sentence - subject, object, indirect object etc.)
English has a bit of this left over in pronouns:
"I gave his book to him."
He gave my book to me."
But in German this extends to
"The ( *nominative form of the* ) man gave the ( (accusative form of the* ) book to the ( *dative form of the* ) other man."

2024-12-02 21:10:10 UTC

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Oh, I totally agree. The closer a language is to your native language, the easier it is.

2024-12-02 20:49:42 UTC

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Italian definitely retains much more of the structure of Latin than French does. French has had more corners knocked off.

2024-12-02 20:43:28 UTC

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While muttering "Poufff."

2024-12-02 20:42:59 UTC

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Yes, you're right, that was an over-simplification on my part. I think it's a combination of time plus external factors, usually lots of encounters with other languages. English is incredibly pared down because it's encountered so many other languages/ cultures which have forced it to simplify (I think for e.g. some of the simplifying influences of the Viking invasions are relatively easy to trace).
I've also heard Spanish referred to as "soldier's Latin" - certainly it has a reputation of being grammatically more straightforward than the other Romance languages. (I find French relatively easy grammatically - Italian is a lot harder for me.)

2024-12-02 20:39:37 UTC

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Hah, that reminds me of a conversation I had when I was at university.
Friend: "Your French is actually pretty fluent, but I can't hold down a conversation at all, but you only got a B and I got an A."
Me: shrugs in confusion.
Friend: "What did they teach you about exam technique in your school?"
Me: "Exam technique? They tried to teach me French. They never mentioned technique."
Friend: "I mean, didn't you have an all-purpose opening sentence using the subjunctive which you memorised to gain the maximum bonus points after which you wrote grammatically flawless three word long sentences so as not to lose any marks?"
Me: "Oh, was that what I was meant to be doing?"

2024-12-02 20:33:27 UTC

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Man those are fuck ugly.
How are the mighty fallen:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Jaguar_E-Type_Series_1_3.8_Litre_1961.jpg/420px-Jaguar_E-Type_Series_1_3.8_Litre_1961.jpg

2024-12-02 20:31:19 UTC

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Oh, I love that! "I was within the action of drinking coffee."
(I seem to remember from my schooldays that Latin had a locative case, but it was hardly ever used even back when Pliny and Catullus and Virgil were writing - an early example of languages typically losing complexity with time.)

2024-12-02 20:16:18 UTC

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I think you can use either construction - the imperfect is probably more common, but the gerund can also be used. (It's a great construction for, e.g., detective novels where Sam Spada is always "doing something" when the "dame who could stop traffic" interrupts him by knocking at the door of his dingy office. I think it's one of those nuanced things depending on exactly what narrative effect you're going for.)

2024-12-02 20:11:51 UTC

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(I have always had a soft spot for "shield-creatures". Wonderfully expressive.)

2024-12-02 20:08:32 UTC

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It's so interesting, isn't it? English and Romance languages both have gerunds (the "is" plus "-ing" construction), often used to express continuous actions interrupted by something - "I was talking when someone rang the doorbell"/ "Sto parlando quando qualcuno ..."
But while English uses a gerund for "it is raining" (presumably because in England rain is often an ongoing, continuous state), French and Italian just use the present tense "il pleut", "ce piove".

2024-12-02 19:59:29 UTC

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There is an image I saw on here from HB's laptop (should have been under a content warning - please people, blur out pics with a "sensitive content" tag) that I really, really wish I could unsee. If it really was from his laptop (and it did not look like it had been faked - though admittedly, these days, who can tell without access to some serious forensic image analysis kit), then trust me, the cocaine/ crack and gun violations are the least of it.

2024-12-02 19:55:49 UTC

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Best Italian lesson ever.

2024-12-02 19:51:45 UTC

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Counting down to mission creep in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...
Ladies and gentlemen (and "non binary pals" - this is Labour we're talking about after all) of the government (especially the treasury) we have a solution to the demographic crisis.

2024-12-02 19:49:48 UTC

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I went there donkey's years ago. It was fab. The Charles Bridge, the castle, the clock.

2024-11-15 22:06:29 UTC

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The plot thickens on the Allison Pearson front. If this tweet is correct (and I have no idea, but there's serious reason to think that this could be a complete clusterfuck on the part of the police) they may not have got the right "Allison Pearson."
https://x.com/StanFastic/status/1857489313979654551

2024-11-14 22:04:24 UTC

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They still exist as an online supplier (in fact I bought stuff from them recently - clothes, not gimp masks, mind. They were out of my size in gimp masks.)

2024-11-14 21:57:10 UTC

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Much as I hate the Karen meme, I did laugh like a drain at "Don't act like a Karen when you're trying to be a Kevin."

2024-11-14 21:49:52 UTC

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Youtube's autoplay has delivered this up next...
Thought fellow Spinsters would find it appropriate.
In fact, I feel there's a casting call just waiting... which one's me, which one's Hebs, which one's Feart?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQM97_iNXhk

2024-11-14 21:44:14 UTC

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Seconding this. That's proper friendship.

2024-11-14 21:41:40 UTC

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Genius. Up there with this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRnd48yTC5A

2024-11-14 21:38:19 UTC

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N'owt weird about that. It's an absolute banger (as the youf of about 20 years ago might have said).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71fZhMXlGT4

2024-11-14 21:28:04 UTC

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I love this so much.
My mum used to dance with me to this when I was a little - I still have the LP, and I used to carry my son round the room dancing to it when he was little.

2024-11-14 21:20:59 UTC

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I've been following the development of these pods (or ones very like them) for several years since I first came across them not long after covid (where shipping containers had been re-purposed). I think someone thought "Well shipping containers are crap, but they are about the right size and can be moved easily on lorries, so prefabricated off site. How about we build something that size, but build it properly?"
They're actually really well thought out. Adequately insulated (some of them are close to passivhaus standards), with a design lifespan of 50 years (so they're not shitty prefabs that are going to fall to bits after 5 years), and they've been very carefully designed in consultation with local authorities and homeless charities (so, for instance, the designs are set up to make it hard for third parties to engage in "cuckooing", where the local drug dealer moves himself into your bedroom and makes you kip on the sofa). They're also a very cost-effective solution.
These were the ones I first came across: https://solohaus.co.uk/

2024-11-14 21:05:56 UTC

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You could probably annoy all of Belgium that way, albeit for different reasons! 😂

2024-11-14 20:41:51 UTC

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Yes, used to piss me off no end when sprog was a baby. That stuff is extortionate.
Plus the NHS is so keen to push breastfeeding that they don't explain how to make up milk safely - even to the extent where their own health visitors don't understand that you use hot water not because the water might be dodgy, but because the *milk powder* is the perfect culture medium for growing nasties. (Yes, I had a health visitor suggest boiling water, putting it in the bottles, storing those in the fridge, then adding milk powder to cold water!)

2024-11-13 21:26:21 UTC

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Furthermore, I don't know why Khelif is whinging seeing as how his own coach (the one who hoisted him shoulder high after he cheated a woman out of the gold) gave an interview to a French sports magazine in which he (the coach) admitted they'd had the IBA tests repeated privately, and the second test had also revealed "chromosomal irregularities" and "high testosterone" (which translates as "XY chromosomes and functioning testes" if you actually know anything about DSDs).
So Khelif's own coach already put all this information out there in the public domain.
Still Khelif did a photoshoot for Vogue, which I guess trumps karyotyping when it comes to establishing womaning credentials.

2024-11-13 21:07:43 UTC

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Agree: all religions are crap with child abuse/ wife beating/ spousal rape etc.
But Christianity adds its own unique little sadistic twist, which I think explains the issues both with Catholicism and Anglicanism. It's to do with doctrines round repentance and forgiveness (and is also a major reason I left Christianity).
When someone "repents of their sins" they ask god - not their victim - for forgiveness, and if their "repentance" is "genuine" god forgives them (again, god, not the victim). So the victim gets cut out of the loop altogether. And priests, as god's middleman on earth, think they have the monopoly on telling perpetrators whether their "repentance" has been judged to be "genuine" and hence whether they are "forgiven" by god.
So it's hardly surprising that the middlemen, having been given this immense power and imaginary insight into the mind of god, think they now have the authority to say "go forth and sin no more", then move the perpetrator to a new parish/ country instead of doing what a normal, well-adjusted, morally balanced person would do, namely saying "What the fuck?" and calling the police.
The suffering of the victim, the victim's need for justice, the victim's need to be heard does not figure in this narrative at all. In fact, if the victim crops up at all it's likely to be in the context of being instructed to be "forgiving" and given a good scolding if they say (not unreasonably) "you know what, actually I am too badly injured by this person to be able to forgive them."

2024-11-13 18:05:02 UTC

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Any Spinsters in the London area might consider going to this:
https://x.com/twelve0fiveUK
Protest from 1.30 to kick off time (5.00pm) outside Wembley on Sunday.

2024-11-13 18:03:05 UTC

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He did some great stuff - I will always remember him as the evil mill owner in "Brass" (1980s parody of JB Priestly/ DS Lawrence/ every clogs-to-riches and Edwardian-romance-across-class-boundaries piece ever).
He also came across as a lovely bloke. His "Canal Journeys" series, which was really about trying to put as much joy into his wife's life as possible despite her gradual decline from Alzheimer's, was sad and touching and uplifting in equal measures.

2024-11-13 17:58:18 UTC

I know people on here have mixed feelings about Jean Hatchet, but this is a stonker of a letter!
https://x.com/JeanHatchet/status/1856253192188617116

2024-11-13 17:55:52 UTC

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"No one needs you to search your souls. We need you to use your brains." 👏

2024-11-11 23:16:38 UTC

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🤣 Ah well, I'm behind the curve as always.

2024-11-11 23:01:52 UTC

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I think a lot of us are lefties who are fed up with the Democrats/ Labour/ Turdeau (genuine typo but seems too accurate to bother correcting it) having completely lost the plot over gender woo (delete according to country) and who simultaneously think Trump is a monster and a madman. It's possible for both of the above to be true.
There was a meme someone posted about those who can't get their heads round the idea that Trump is awful AND Biden/ Biden mark 2 are also awful are seriously underestimating the amount of shit that's out there.
The election was a choice between a shit sandwich and turd burger.
Or put it another way - Trump and his merry men are coming for your reproductive rights. (Supermajority? There's all sorts of federal laws he could pass with a supermajority. The "I've devolved decision making back to individual states" line is going to become old news really fast.) But Kamala and her merry troons were coming for your daughters' ovaries and sports medals and happily putting male rapists into women's prisons. Both sides hate women.

2024-11-11 20:16:18 UTC

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Reminds me of this exchange on twatter, as quoted on Mumsnet:
I've such respect for him [Ross Tucker] - he's been a powerful ally for women's sport with. My favourite moment was when he was challenged about his research and evidence and asked by some bullying twatterer:
"Are you a biologist? Are you a scientist? Published a paper in a peer reviewed journal? If not, STFU".
He just answered "Yes, yes, yes and yes"

2024-11-11 20:10:40 UTC

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Ah I see you beat me to it - and were more succinct as ever.

2024-11-11 19:53:51 UTC

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It's an interesting idea for a Labour government. Send food prices through the roof while simultaneously making employing people so expensive that unemployment also skyrockets. What was that slogan about "For the many, not the few"?

2024-11-11 19:42:01 UTC

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That as well.

2024-11-11 19:40:34 UTC

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Raping an underage child, or as it's coyly misnamed, underage sex should be a strict liability crime. In other words, mens rea shouldn't be a factor. If the child is beneath the age of consent the perpetrator should be found guilty.
After all, supermarkets have "Think 25" posters up because for them, selling alcohol to someone under 18 is illegal. If they can do it for supermarkets selling booze, they sure as hell can do it for predatory men wanting to rape children.

2024-11-10 19:39:53 UTC

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I've seen quite a few similar videos, and I'm beginning to wonder how many of them are AI deepfakes.
They're unusually articulate and to the point for Trump (if you compare them to newsreel footage where he tends to waffle - "We're gonna make America great again, and that's what we're gonna do, because we want to make America great again" - I paraphrase but he does have a tendency to go round in circles).
They're also strangely static round the upper cheeks and eyes. (This one at least has him blinking. The last very very similar one, he didn't blink at all. Obviously someone has tweaked the code.)
Also, it sounds like this is one of those typical politician tricks of "I'm going to ban/ defend so-and-so" when in fact there is *already legislation banning/ defending so-and-so* (in this case rather obviously the 1st Amendment.)

2024-11-09 23:01:34 UTC

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That had occurred to me to as an analysis.
It's win-win. You get to expand the definition of "cancel culture" to be so broad that it becomes meaningless and ceases to be a useful tool of analysis, while lumping in other behaviours under a heading that the establishment wishes to disparage (that disparaging "cancel culture" is correct is neither here nor there; the point is for the establishment to flex its power, not to do anything useful - if it occasionally achieves something useful, that tends to be by accident).

2024-11-09 22:45:47 UTC

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I completely agree. We don't know. But I was intrigued at the suggestion that things were not as originally presented.

2024-11-09 22:09:39 UTC

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Maybe he was thinking of this bear:
https://ewh.org.uk/wojtek-the-bear/

2024-11-09 15:50:35 UTC

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Well done. I am team Shermichael on this issue (not a phrase I ever thought I'd utter).

2024-11-09 13:48:32 UTC

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Jay Michaelson knows as well as I do that "transgirls" are in fact boys, and they should not be in girls' sports. He is flat-out lying for brownie points from fellow members of the cult he signed up to.

2024-11-08 11:31:41 UTC

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As Groucho Marx said "These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others..."

2024-11-07 21:51:17 UTC

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Phttt you were already at the mercy of the algorithm. This will just nudge things down a little further, but the overall trajectory will be unchanged.

2024-11-07 21:49:50 UTC

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You watched it so we don't have to - thanks for taking one for the team.

2024-11-07 21:43:12 UTC

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You could pretend that was a tropical sunset.

2024-11-07 21:02:10 UTC

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No, grey and murky here - but it was certainly dark.

2024-11-07 20:52:17 UTC

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My feelings exactly at 4.45 this afternoon looking out of the office window.

2024-11-07 19:47:18 UTC

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🤣
I have a friend wore DMs under her wedding dress.

2024-11-07 19:35:38 UTC

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Well, way out in front is:
"No"
Said to this sort of man in any context whatsoever.
With you on "I like cats..." - would deffo be in my top 5 guesses.
"What a lovely baby..."
"Oh, I don't have any maternal feelings..."
(I think we can guarantee there will be a high level of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" and "house always wins" about this game.)

2024-11-06 19:57:23 UTC

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Yes, Poland, the eastern European states, the Baltic states, the Scandinavian states are doing incredible things. (The western European nations not so much...)
But I do wonder whether they can carry the burden all by themselves. If Trump pulls the plug that's a substantial amount of input gone, and the Ukrainians need all the help they can get. Plus they need the really high-tech anti missile stuff that the US can supply.
And Putin is absolutely eyeing up "where next." My money's on Lithuania being very near the top of the list because of Kaliningrad and Baltic Sea access.

2024-11-06 19:46:11 UTC

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Teen and I were watching his speech earlier on the BBC. It was "and the USA will be great, the greatest. I will see to it that it'll be great. Real great. Bigly great. The greatest." (I can't remember the exact wording, but honestly there was no more substantive content than this.) Teen looked on and said "He's not actually saying *anything*, is he?"

2024-11-06 19:42:50 UTC

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Once upon a time SNL could take the piss out of themselves...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKOb-kmOgpI

2024-11-06 18:52:45 UTC

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There is of course a historical precedent - it's widely thought that LB Johnson was not compos mentis for the tail end of his presidency and Ladybird Johnson was in fact running the country.
Easier trick to pull off pre TV cameras, mind you.

2024-11-06 18:49:32 UTC

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He's doing what Mafia bosses always do.
"Nice two-thirds of a country you've got there. Be a shame if the supply of missiles dried up and the Russians took all of it..."
That's what he's intending to threaten them with. Zelensky's between a rock and a hard place. If he agrees, he loses a third of his country (in the knowledge - following past behaviour in Crimea - that the Russians will rebuild, regroup, grow a new generation of soldiers to adulthood, then come back for another go). Or he says no, the US pulls the plug on materiel, and the Russians are in Kiev by Easter.
Then the Russians rebuild, regroup, grow a new generation... and go after the Baltic states.

2024-11-06 18:40:10 UTC

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The flip-side of course being guilt by association.
"If you question trans ideology/ covid lockdowns/ defund the police you must be a right wing nutter."
"If you believe climate change is a thing you must be a left wing simp/ bed-wetter."

2024-11-06 18:38:27 UTC

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Feel free!

2024-11-06 18:36:15 UTC

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Oh yes, I do see it on the right too.
The kind of portmanteau politics that has bedevilled my own side ("If you're for abortion rights, you must be for trans rights and for open borders and and and...") also has its equivalent on the right ("If you're worried about the social chaos resulting from defund the police and the socially divisive effects of critical race theory, you must also think covid was a hoax concocted by big pharma and climate change is a con job...")
Package deal politics is the scourge of our age.

2024-11-06 18:33:24 UTC

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Absolutely agree with this.
I have met a lot of people who are terrified they will become "tainted" - from the atheist who won't attend a service for the architecture and the music through to the TRA ideologue whose knee-jerk reaction to any contrary literature is "Don't look at that, it's not safe to look at that, when we said 'educate yourself' we meant learn our holy scriptures by rote."

2024-11-06 18:31:26 UTC

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See the clip of today's PMQs @RadicalCartoons posted earlier - Badenoch (quite correctly) absolutely ripping shreds off Lammy for his comments about Trump and Dawn Butler for her personal, racist attack on Badenoch herself.
Everything Lammy and Butler throw at their opponents (accusations of being unstatesmanlike, accusations of racism respectively, to name but two) they are guilty of themselves.

2024-11-06 18:26:38 UTC

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The left (and I am a lefty) are prone to this.
They see the world in Manichean terms: "I have identified that the side I am on is the RIGHTEOUS one, therefore no further analysis is necessary, because my opponents are EVIL."
Whereas (whatever their failings) people on the right tend to be pragmatic (pace your well-made comments earlier about the Religious element of Trump's support). It's a case of "Which candidate works better for me in the current economy?" rather than a question of good and evil.
People should grow out of this by the age of 18, but sadly, on the left, a substantial minority do not.

2024-11-06 18:16:59 UTC

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Oh yes, the reasons they voted for him (based on social media versions of what he allegedly believe) and what he is likely to do are poles apart.

2024-11-06 18:15:41 UTC

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I think I'd agree with pretty much all of that (and it's why I not merely hate the "they voted that way because they're thick and racist" rhetoric, I also think it's a profoundly wrong misreading of the political situation).
The one thing I'd take issue with is the "anyone can become a millionaire" thing. Many (perhaps the majority) of Americans do indeed profoundly believe that, but they're kidding themselves if they think that belief corresponds to reality.

2024-11-06 18:07:45 UTC

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Rumour has it she has a speech lined up for 4pm Washington time (9pm GMT).

2024-11-06 18:06:19 UTC

I am having a head-desk moment which I can't rant about in RL so I'm ranting on here. Lovely American friend, but woke as woke can be.
She is horrified by Trump's election (I can't say it fills me with joy either - a lying, cheating, sex-offending, probably senile sociopath whose behaviour has undoubtedly led to many abortions but who's seen fit to remove women's right to abortion, in charge of the nuclear button.)
But what I can't get over is her response - she's shocked and completely blindsided by it. Then admits she does live in a "progressive" bubble (her word).
Why? She was a grown up in 2016. She's seen this happen before. The polls were tight. Kamala was uninspiring (unless you went down the "woman and black, therefore best thing since sliced bread" route, which really shouldn't have survived a single one of her interviews as a judgement call on her abilities).
Furthermore, if you live in a bubble, and, by your own admission, you know you live in a bubble, and you'd already been burned once by this attitude (2016) wouldn't you take time to step outside it and inform yourself, even if only in a Sun Tzu "Know your enemy" tactical sort of way?
That's why I took out a sub to the Telegraph. To find out how the other side thinks (plus it's the only mainstream UK paper with decent women's sports coverage). That's why I took the time to read the intro to Vance's autobiography.
Because I don't want to be blind-sided. If you don't know what your opponent's up to, and who else is on their side, and why, then (apols for shouting) YOU ARE GOING TO GET SHAFTED.

2024-11-06 17:48:23 UTC

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I told you she'd be good value at PMQs 😂
Can't stand most of her policies but by god she's going to hold Keir's feet to the fire. 😂 😂

2024-11-06 17:44:19 UTC

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Add to this a crucial distinction in the women's game. Lack of androgenising effects of male puberty means the age ranges aren't tightly policed the way they are in men's football.
A 17 year old teen boy would not be playing against grown-assed men, because of safety considerations.
17 year old girls can (and do) play against adult women because female puberty doesn't lead to a dramatic increase in muscle bulk. (In fact back in my Sunday league days we regularly used to get our arses handed to us on a plate by teams of schoolgirls.)
Yet apparently a grown man in a dress can play against a 17 year old girl because "magic gendah feelz."

2024-11-06 17:41:34 UTC

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Yeah, I posted about this back when the news broke. She didn't even do an Austen Powers "That's a man, man!" She asked for clarification cos the guy had a beard, then (such is the power of woke indoctrination in schools) apologised profusely and back-pedalled.
It's fucking shocking.