Flick 🇬🇧
pleroma
2.6.50-934-gba81107e.main+soapbox
New Spinsters: I’m not going to follow back until you post a bit.
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Posts
I’m really enjoying this podcast. It’s basically Dr Annie Grey pontificating.
https://www.historyextra.com/membership/historys-greatest-dishes-season-1/
While a trans-identifying person might be left feeling upset – or, after the current fashion, ‘unsafe’ – to hear themselves referred to by their sex-based pronouns, the person prohibited from stating objective facts or forced to speak untruths is caused no less distress. Insisting that someone comply with your gender preferences – that they, in effect, become part of the self-identification process – when you know they don’t want to is coercion. Insisting they do so on pain of being accused of harmful or bigoted conduct is emotional blackmail. What is being sought is not courtesy but submission.
— Stephen Daisley
https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/05/17/the-gross-hypocrisy-of-teen-social-media-bans/
The problem here is that the Australian government’s apparent concern about protecting children collapses completely under scrutiny. As many have pointed out, far more explicit corners of the internet such as Pornhub and OnlyFans remain only partially policed, inconsistently age-gated, and easily evaded with a virtual private network (VPN). Children also continue to inhabit the gaming-platform, Roblox, which was not on the government’s verboten list, despite the grooming risks there being well documented.
But the hypocrisy extends beyond inconsistent bans. Far more damning is the fact that the very same bureaucrats who recently discovered the notion of childhood innocence have, for years, been exposing schoolchildren to sexualised and ideological material over which parents have little meaningful control. Such material has been disguised within benign-sounding programmes such as Australia’s ‘Respectful Relationships Education’ or the UK’s ‘Relationships and Sex Education’ (RSE). Yet on closer inspection, both are awash with gender theory, queer theory, intersectional feminism, toxic-masculinity workshops and third-party classroom activities so explicit they would make Bonnie Blue blush.
A friend of mine is on holiday in Italy and sending about fifty photos a day, of everything from architecture to hotel rooms to food, to basically her entire WhatsApp contact list (I have muted her, it was driving me nuts).
This was a particularly unfortunate juxtaposition when I came to my daily check of what she’s been up to.
Incredibly quick and easy, took ten minutes to get it in the oven.
The Government has privately admitted Ed Miliband's wind turbines and solar farms are bad for the environment.
Astonishingly, it shows for the first time that Labour realise the rush for Net Zero will come at the expense of the environment, but are pushing ahead anyway.
Bureaucrats admit the plans may destroy 'nationally recognised sites, landscapes and historic environments' as well as damaging 'biodiversity and water resources'.
Officials also confess his schemes may increase 'air emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, noise and vibrations, light pollution, dust and soils.'
They also say these negative effects could 'occur repeatedly' and 'have impacts over the short, medium to long term', as well as during construction.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the Unite the Kingdom rally was just how unremarkable it felt. There were no mass chants calling for the death of particular groups, no calls for the eradication of foreign countries, and no flags of terrorist groups or tyrannical theocracies waved in the crowd. Nobody cited scripture to urge the slaughter of another people, nobody waved terrorist symbols, and nobody I saw during the entire day covered their face.
We live in such peculiar times that this is what set the march apart from the dozens of others which have descended on the streets of London over the last couple of years, totally unchallenged – even protected – by the police and our government. Yet this outlier was the first march Keir Starmer decided to speak out against since taking office as Prime Minister, threatening police action and the full force of the law against those involved, and pulling out all the stops to block foreign speakers from entering the country at the last minute. Of all the political protests we’ve witnessed since Labour won the general election – and we’ve witnessed many – this was the one he chose to obstruct repeatedly. This was the hill he chose to die on.
Huh. Sunny and hail.
Huh. It’s not a bad day, if chilly, but apparently we’re not having a walk.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/02/graham-linehan-transgender-supreme-court-ruling-labour/
It’s long past time the state stopped pretending the trans movement is anything other than a demanding, entitled male sexual rights movement. There can be no progress until that aspect of trans activism is acknowledged. Trans rights activism is uniquely violent, aggressive, dishonest, entitled and sadistic. It isn’t enough that the cases stop. The police need to start policing the men bringing them.
The simplest legislative fix is one the Government already has in front of it. Implement the Supreme Court ruling, without delay. The ruling would return us to a position most people in this country have always taken as obvious. The reason it isn’t being implemented is that our politicians are too frightened, or too confused, to stand up to the truth.
Keir Starmer famously said it was wrong to claim that only women had a cervix. David Lammy seemed to think men could actually grow one. We have a political class so terrified of being called bigots by the millennials in their staff that they’re prepared to look completely ridiculous in public. I fear nothing will change while such useful idiots are in charge.
Horrible thought: I hope I’ve not inadvertently turned into a blue LED headlight wanker. I think this car is too new for that. Hopefully.
Interesting detail:
https://spectator.com/article/how-dangerous-is-the-cruise-ship-virus-outbreak/
There is a key part of this story that has not yet been told. When the ship docked at Ascension Island, having had one death at sea and disembarked a second case at St Helena (who died on arrival in South Africa), a third person was ill. The doctor on Ascension, Bill Hardy, realised he was seeing a cluster of infections so he called the British Overseas Territories’ on-call infectious disease medic in Britain, Matthew Dryden.
By chance Dryden and his colleagues had recently got the Foreign Office to equip all the overseas territories with simple-to-use kits to test for rare diseases. So Dryden suggested testing for Legionella and bird flu. Both came up negative.
Dryden then called Professor Lucille Bloomberg at South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases, and she tracked down the third case to a private hospital in Johannesburg. Bloomberg took the samples to the institute and on a hunch tested them for hantavirus: they were positive. She then found samples from the second case, just before they were discarded, and tested them too: also positive. All within 24 hours.
Oh god, there’s a weeb convention in the hotel.
I win the “stupid hotel toilet/bathroom door” contest!
(It is a single room, in their defence.)
I’m away this weekend, behave yourselves.
https://spectator.com/article/textbooks-will-always-beat-screens/
John Jerrim, a UCL-based educational researcher, conducted an experiment where 3,000 pupils took PISA tests in maths, science and reading. Over three months, half the group did all their work on paper and half on a computer. At the end, the paper-based group scored 20 points higher than the one working on screens – the equivalent of half a year’s extra schooling.
Nearly 100 per cent of ten-year-olds in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are issued with standardised textbooks in core subjects, compared with 10 per cent here. These countries, unsurprisingly, all vastly outperform us in these subjects, according to the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.
Sadly, British schools often have no choice but to buy digital resources because publishers like Pearson have killed off the textbooks they once printed. Such a policy is a sunk-cost fallacy. The real cost – to our children’s ability to concentrate and learn – is immeasurable. A healthy, thoughtful, productive society is not a realistic expectation if children are not learning properly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/opinion/ai-doppelganger-deepfake-grammarly.html
Like all writers, I live by my wits. My ability to earn a living rests on my ability to craft a phrase, to synthesize an idea, to make readers care about people and places they can only access through words on a page. Grammarly hadn’t checked with me before using my name. I only learned that an A.I. company was selling a deepfake of my mind from an article online.
And it wasn’t just me. Superhuman — the parent company of Grammarly — made fake editor versions of a range of people, including the novelist Stephen King, the late feminist author bell hooks, the former Microsoft chief privacy officer Julie Brill, the University of Virginia data science professor Mar Hicks and the journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher.
At this point in a story about A.I. exploitation, I would normally bemoan the need for new laws to tackle the novel harms of a new technology. But in this case, there is an old law that’s able to do the job.
In my home state of New York, the century-old right of publicity law prohibits a person’s name or image from being used for commercial purposes without her consent. At least 25 states have similar publicity statutes. And now, I’m using this law to fight back. I am the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that it violated New York and California publicity laws by not seeking consent before using our names in a paid service.
Some good news:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/27/koran-burner-wins-landmark-blasphemy-case/
A man who burned a Koran in a demonstration outside the Turkish consulate has won a landmark blasphemy case at the High Court.
Hamit Coskun, 51, previously succeeded in overturning a conviction for holding up a flaming copy of the holy book and shouting “f---- Islam”, in what he insisted was a political protest.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) appealed against the decision, claiming his actions were criminal and amounted to disorderly conduct.
In a judgment handed down on Friday, Lord Justice Warby and Ms Justice Obi upheld the decision to overturn the conviction.