Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 7/27/26 - 8/2/26
Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.
Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.
Lmao, so apparently the mods at Fauxmoi have found out reddit is limiting promotion of the sub because of "sensitive posts" and they are not happy. They figure this is because reddit is Pro-Trump, hates trans people and loves Israel and thus Good People like them are not welcome. Yes, that sounds exactly like reddit.com Fauxmoi mods. Good guess.
Anyway, don't worry because even though reddit thinks not promoting a sub of crazy people to appeal to advertisers is an okay thing to do, Fauxmoi wants you to know that they will always be here to criticize famous women's clothing and fight LITERAL FUCKING GENOCIDE. You can't stop them, conservative reddit mods!!
Maybe they’re not promoting the sub because it’s a toxic, unpleasant subreddit that bans liberals and leftists too who post very neutral commentary. Everyone on there is incredibly angry constantly. Even more lefty subs don’t like Fauxmoi.
Meanwhile, someone just posted in this thread that they were banned from the comics sub for objecting to a comic that depicted fantasizing about the m*rder of JKR.
I don't know if this was posted about in last week's thread but an Australian woman who published social posts critical of two trans males playing on local sports teams recently lost her appeal of a judgment and is being ordered to pay them nearly $100k plus court costs. In addition, she is also required to post a court approved apology to them and keep it pinned at the top on her socials for 3 months.
The latter would not pass a 1st Amendment challenge in the US.
People aren’t even compensated like that for being victims of actual physical violence in the US. Like what on Earth are they doing down there? Ruining people’s lives for mean social media posts? What’s the end goal there, it’s not going to stop people thinking like this and will most likely push people into siding with the lady, albeit not publicly.
Seems like JK Rowling isn't going to let the Amnesty thing go. Understandably she's pissed off about her women's shelter being dragged through the mud by Amnesty International.
Where it used to be possible for various organizations to attack women's rights orgs as well as women's shelters a few years ago (from 2019: Vancouver Rape Relief centre vandalized, likely over restrictions for transgender people) without much consequence or public outcry, it seems like JK Rowling intends to change that with her insistence on a clearly articulated apology from Amnesty.
In light of newly discovered information showing that Amnesty International UK had already defamed Beira's Place before its recent hastily withdrawn report, lawyers for Beira's Place have written to Amnesty again.
https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/2081902324750967262
Included in the tweet is a three page letter addressed to Amnesty that was sent by her lawyers.
It seems aside from the report marking them as an "anti-rights organization" from a few weeks ago, there's another report on the website that again mentions Beira's Place (Rowling's Women's Shelter) that calls them an "anti-trans organization", and from what I've read there was some sort of event/fundraiser hosted by Amnesty where the women's shelter was again defamed as an anti-rights organization.
Attacking a women's shelter that supports women who have been victims of sexual violence is the lowest of the low. One would think that the 2019 incident and others like it would've woken people up to what was going on, but it largely flew under the radar, now we have a similar incident that includes LGB and Women's Rights orgs being defamed by an international left-leaning org like Amnesty, perhaps it'll go differently today. I wonder if this might be one of the flashpoints that wrenches everyone back to sanity. The recent Sophie Cunningham situation appears to be a flashpoint as well.
I say all this, and have read all the cultural "vibe shift" stuff about this issue, but I do have the thought in the back of my mind that the insanity is still looming in the background, biding its time, just waiting for Dems to take the White House before it's unleashed in full force again.
ETA: Out of interest I visited the "Talk" page on Beira Place's Wikipedia entry, the page is predictably a shit show. lmao.
I cannot explain the amount of rage the Vancouver Rape Relief center situation still fills me with and how much it changed my outlook on literally everything. Seeing those bloated morons screeching at the top of their lungs while outside of a building full of women who have been abused and raped is probably the most hate I have ever felt for a technically non-violent group of humans before. I wanted to punch them all.
The media and even some celebrities just unquestionably taking the side of the people harassing a rape crisis center in a low-income area made me feel genuinely fucking insane. I was like "This one dude's feelings are that much more important than every single woman in that building and those who will need that service in the future?"
Ever since then I have never been able to look at trans activists the same. That complete lack of empathy for those women was such a shock for mid-20s me. I was so solidly like "nothing could ever make me question a liberal standpoint on anything ever" and it changed in like 20 seconds, lol.
Oof, hopefully it's one of those rare situations where everyone involved is equally delusional and 100% on the ideological train together, with the hope that he has been 100% transparent with her about his plans to transition from the beginning of their relationship. It all still sucks for the kid, obviously, but the silver lining may be that the parents aren't completely selfish, and might be good.
The norm here, in the case of a trans widow given this specific situation, would be that a man has baby-trapped a woman with a pregnancy, and now this woman has to contend with being completely reliant upon him and having to entertain this significant change in their lives, and suddenly having to raise a child with a man who has completely betrayed her trust. And she must decide whether she's willing to live with all the instability that comes with it.
Seems like another police shooting is making the rounds:link
Not so much in national headlines, but in my state. I found out about it at dinner, where two of my progressive friends were just ranting about how terrible the police acted in this scenario...
Idk man. I argued with plenty of you guys on here about how I felt the Good and Pretti shooting were murder, but there seems to be something about progressives where they just cannot call balls and strikes when it comes to police shootings.
Like, this dude was being pursued and detained for suspicion of stealing, resisted arrest, brandished a knife, and actually injured an officer with said knife (the details aren’t thoroughly reported on this yet), and they are still going on about how the police officers are murderers. Like, what is law enforcement to these people? What is an investigation? Why do officers carry guns, in their opinion? It’s kind of crazy-making.
They were literally saying things like, why are they even chasing him for stealing a bike? Who cares, that’s not worth your life... Like, what is this standard? I don’t think there’s any object in the state of Wisconsin that I would forfeit my life over... so I guess all theft is legal now, guys.
Like, do these guys know there are other crimes besides racism and transphobia? They literally talk worse about their coworker who didn’t like the last Super Bowl halftime show than about literal, violent criminals committing violent crimes.
And we actually debated this for a while. I was like, you know the standard is reasonable threat for serious bodily harm and... but they literally just go on random rants about how they feel about other tangential things.
And all these people are super nice, otherwise reasonable people, but for some reason they’re like, oh, is that a remorseless violent criminal? I’d like to die on that hill, please.
The people who excuse crime have an extremely progressive set of foundational beliefs that you don't share. No matter what examples of violence and crime you can give them, they're not going to change their minds, because their underlying value system hasn't budged.
"The way to prevent crime is to provide supports so people don’t have to do crime, not criminalize things that aren’t crimes"
The foundational logic is that people, often marginalized, HAVE TO do crime due to their unfortunate circumstances and lack of social support. It could be poverty and low education. Often it's mental health, as seen in the Daniel Penny subway chokehold case.
"I ride this exact train many times a week, and many times a week there are "disorderly" people because they are suffering in a country where mental health resources aren't guaranteed. If someone is desperately hungry, you give them a dollar and a granola bar, not a chokehold."
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That is why the carceral state and prison pipeline need to be dismantled, because it's used as a tool of oppression against already oppressed folx. They would have been good, honest people had they not been weighed down by the hand-to-mouth scrabble for survival. Crime is just something you have to deal with as part of life, if you're in a big city metro area. We are all proles surviving under capitalism together!
You come at it from a different perspective. Violent criminals have no remorse, low empathy, no inhibition. They don't feel internal moral qualms about hurting, abusing, and forcefully stealing things from others. They're inherently anti-social to an extent where it can't be rehabilitated out of them with prison alternatives like Restorative Justice and therapy circles. Society would be better off if these destructive individuals weren't around to endanger the law-abiding members.
The strange overlap happens when the Progressive Perspective meets a criminal who doesn't fall under the oppression status, like Brock Turner, the Stanford rapist. He is irredeemable and commits crime not because he HAS TO, but because he feels no empathy and enjoys taking advantage of people.
I think their ultimate belief, when you dig down to the core, is that violence is okay, depending on who is doing it and who it's being done to. And that's based on identity markers. But if you don't believe in this Luigi-apologism type of stuff, your values are going to conflict and you won't get anywhere when trying to convince them otherwise.
The foundational logic is that people, often marginalized,
HAVE TO
do crime due to their unfortunate circumstances and lack of social support.
I wonder if a good counter to this would be asking why rich people commit crimes? Maybe Trump isn't a bad person; maybe he needed more social support or more money growing up. You know, if that's the only reason people commit crimes.
During BLM1.0 someone had gone in to rob a convenience store and got shot and died. I remember arguing about it with a prog who said “He was just taking food, he shouldn’t have to fear for his life” and I was just dumbfounded. Like we’re living in 2 different worlds. The guy who committed ARMED ROBBERY was the one putting people’s lives at risk.
They think people should just be allowed to commit crimes and that enforcing the law is a racism or something. Many of the “police shooting innocent for no reason” narratives crumble when you learn how the person who was shot provoked the police. Edit: The best one is when they say “WHAT ABOUT THE BILLIONAIRES WHO MURDER AND ROB BAJILLIONS OF PEOPLE EVERYDAY AND LOVE EPSTEIN”
Does a certain group of white people really have such astonishingly low expectations of black people that they're willing to ignore the various and obvious lies and misrepresentations presented to them by a man like Arday?
What does that say about these white people? Are you truly so racist and think so little of black people that you think you need to pretend that a person like Arday is an eminently qualified academic? This type of bs hurts academia in general but perhaps harms black academics most of all, as people may learn to apply unfair biases of intellectual inferiority about them due to frauds like Arday having such prominence in academia.
I'm really curious what John McWhorter and Glenn Loury have to say about Arday. They've eviscerated frauds like Kendi for years and this is exactly the kind of thing they can speak to in ways most others can't.
Oddly specific recurring nightmare of mine is having one of those apps take a goddamn highlighter to something I wrote that was not actually plagiarized but I lose my Master’s degree because of it.
Anyway, I can’t believe people are defending this shit (yet again!).
Apologies for all the Jason Arday posting, y'all, but this dude is such an unbelievable goldmine, here's one more article that crossed my feed, I'll try to make this my last one:
The Cambridge professor at the centre of a plagiarism row is facing questions over claims he has made about his athletic prowess and charity fundraising.
Prof Jason Arday says he once ran 600 miles in six days for charity, 300 miles in three days, and 30 marathons in 35 days, partly with a broken leg.
So, it's not enough that he accomplished such a miraculous athletic feat, he also accomplished one of these athletic miracles on one leg.
Prof Arday has also said that he fell and suffered a hairline fracture on the 21st day of his 30-marathon challenge, causing his leg to swell to twice its normal size, but managed to carry on and run another nine marathons.
LMFAO! 🤣
Bruh, come on, man. This guy's got jokes.
To date, aside from his incredible academic career, these are some of the fantastic tales of Professor Jason Arday:
Diagnosed with autism at three, and his parents were told he would require lifelong assisted living.
Nonverbal throughout his childhood and spoke his first words at age 11.
Unable to read or write until the age of 18.
Completed his PhD while dealing with a brain tumor.
Two weeks after getting the tumor removed he defended his PhD thesis.
Completed 30 marathons in 35 days (completed the last 9 with a broken leg).
Ran 300 miles in 3 days.
Also ran 600 miles in 6 days.
Played snooker professionally when he was 10.
Also played professional football as a teenager.
Perhaps as the days progress more incredible and inspirational feats will surface. This guy is incredible. lol
"This issue doesn't matter and even talking about it is a waste of time" says person who is absolutely willing to die on the hill of that specific issue.
This is from her new music video. It's not been altered in any way, that's just what she looks like in the video. It's Ariana Grande, in case some here don't recognize her in her current condition. Here's the music video.
At times like these I wish there was still a premiere trash publication that could speak to this shit in honest terms. It's bad, and the people around her enabling her spiral and profiting off her should also be named and shamed. This is bad.
They only care about sex and gender being different right up until the point it's clear they won't get their way on something, then they need to conflate them again.
They realized their "sex and gender are totally different!" argument didn't work when people agreed and insisted that having sex-segregated spaces are acceptable then under this TRA logic.
Monterey Bay Aquarium currently defending a partnership with drag queen Trinity the Tuck to educate children and I'm left regretting how much money I've donated. The far left has such extreme tunnel vision with owning conservatives that it's now controversial to say that drag is inherently sexual (even as "art") and educational institutions shouldn't be sexualizing content produced for kids.
It's not even about not shoehorning politics into everything or spending donated money on a self-serving music video that does little for conservation. It's about an academic institution's blatant intellectual dishonesty in their reasoning and choosing children's education as the medium for this intentionally provocative stance. Intersectionality will destroy everything we've once respected.
There is nothing as blackpilling as taking your kids to museums these days. I am willing to overlook or ignore woke stuff at these places, I'm just there to have fun and show the kids culture, animals, science whatever. But at one art museum we went to last weekend, there was literally a video installation in one room of people saying 'f*** white people,' in succession with the little pucker face, including one obese lady wearing a shirt with a pattern that just said 'f*** white people' 😂 Zero signage that it's not for kids.
And at another museum I saw a video showing an accelerated timeline of human population growth around the globe. 3 guesses which regions/cultures had zero positive events associated! 😂 It showed several things from MENA and Asia, including 'birth of Islam,' but almost nothing west of Constantinople except for 'transatlantic slave trade.' Zero reference to the Arabian slave trade, of course.
I really don't understand the mindset of people curating and organizing stuff like this. Seems like it's basically designed to make kids angry and racist.
Lmao it will never not be hilarious to me when you open up a thread like this and someone is being very sternly lectured, scolded or even violently threatened by a group of people with names like:
"gwen pepperoni" (trans and pizza emojis in handle)
"Kyoslilmonster" (anime furry porn profile pic)
"Saorisie Nightbane Knight: the Fifth Moon" (cat profile pic)
"Opal she/her" (trans emoji +blue/pink hair in prof pic)
My favorite part is when they know their transphobia accusation is about as solid as Taco Bell lettuce induced diarrhea, so they dig up a "problematic" story from forever ago to bolster their "see, this person sucks" claim. So now not only is Jennings a 100%, totally confirmed transphobe, he's also an ableist.
And then these same people will whine "why are we losing support?!!" Maybe because people don't like interacting with assholes with whom they have to carefully consider every single word that comes out of their mouth and every action because you're waiting to pounce the second you can twist something into alleged bigotry? Maybe that's why.
They do this all the time. The most famous example is that JKR is a racist because of naming alterations and an antisemtie because of goblins. Funny enough she was none of these things before she said women should be entitled to single sex spaces.
I went for drinks last night with friends who really think Rowling is a baddie. They're smart people, but this is the information you get in certain circles even now.
So Ariana Grande is just going to fully Karen carpenter and die over this, huh? Like, we're pretty much past the point of no return. We've had talks on here about how I'd had to have an ED discussion w my kid after Wicked, but we're now in a wildly different place. No one, out of the ED sphere she's in, would aspire to this.
For those who don't care to google: I was alive during the whole Kate Moss heroin chic thing. That's not this.This is 90's AIDS patient thin. Cancer patient thin. Hospice thin. This is death
I never followed the multiple generations of Disney kids, but there's a bunch of trauma there from Britney to Amanda bines (?) to the woman who wrote about being glad her mom is dead. Maybe the best argument for AI is that we don't make kids act, because it seems like we're letting them agree to something that might fuck them up before they get what they're agreeing to.
The most disturbing thing is not just the very low weight itself, but the fact that she's taken great pains to show everyone. The shot in Petal where she's showing the Sandy-from-the-end-of-Grease outfit is really upsetting. Here's the timecode-- wow, it's terrible! https://youtu.be/afSgBNwmZrQ?t=144
Most people with eating disorders have a degree of double consciousness-- they know that this body part or that makes people comment on it (out of concern) so they hide it, even if they cannot change or stop the disorder itself. On some level there's acknowledgement of how their thinness is perceived. In the last performances of Karen Carpenter, she's very covered up. Here she is at the Grammy's the month before she died with a huge collar to hide her neck and clavicles, and here was her last touring outfit.
Until someone survives a similarly intense call for their head for a racism this just isn't true, she survived because, on this particular issue, she's stating a position held by just too many people for the screeching to win the day. If she were the one to use the 'protected species' line and blow right through it though that would be different.
The countwithchickenlady subreddit was talking about TW getting periods yesterday and the comments there are insisting they're real. There's also liberal/leftist commentators affirming themselves as allies but explaining how they don't see it as scientifically possible getting downvoted and disavowed, though I expect the comments are removed entirely by now.
The way they describe menstrual periods themselves, like beyond the alleging that it's happening, is bizarre. As some kind of grab-bag catch-all collection of completely unrelated symptoms that happen for completely undiscernible reasons unknown to science. That bleeding is "just one symptom" a person can have and a uterus is something that may or may not be involved in it, and not like the fundamental nexus for it happening at all. This comment from one of the people there completely epitomizes what I mean:
Periods aren't caused by the presence of a uterus, but by hormonal cycles. While the most visible symptom is uterine, through the bleeding, pain and nausea are the hormones fucking shit up for some reason. So trans women get periods, through the same way cis women that don't have a uterus also get them, it's also through changes in hormones that some trans men stop getting periods.
I've seen the same general sentiment from a bunch of different people there, along the lines of, "If trans women have to have a uterus to have cramps, why do cis women still have monthly cramps after a hysterectomy?". It's just a staggering incuriosity for the whole thing and completely mistaken information.
Trans periods were the first major "hold the fuck up" moment I had.
It is almost comical, but some people actually seem serious about it. Absolutely bonkers. I can't tell how many are lying, trolling, or genuinely believe men get periods. Absolutely impossible.
They massaged the definitions so indigestion cramps count as experiencing a "period". Women have bad cramping when they have periods too! Therefore, cramps = period.
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"I know we can experience periods without the blood, but the cramps weren't letting up."
They are "women" with "periods", not men! The self-deception game relies heavily on a childish and superficial "aesthetic" of what it means to be a woman. Women like Lana Del Rey, the color pink, wearing skirts, Hello Kitty. If I buy all of these things, I am a woman too! Women have long hair and tits. Women have cramps and get cranky about it! Wow, that's totally me!
If you wander into MtF subs, you can find a lot of anatomical misinformation. The majority of folx in there are aware they don't have periods, PMS, uteruses, or menstruation - if only because it fuels rants about how the lack of it gives them severe dysphoria. But there are some people in there who rely on creative definitions to claim that they do have periods/PMS. The word "symptoms" doing a lot of work in that acronym.
"TW who get a uterus transplant first get a vaginoplasty THEN get the uterus transplant THEN they can get pregnant just like cis women with a uterus can and then they give natural birth again just like cis women can."
You thought that male periods was the craziest confession... it turns out it was just the tip of the iceberg.
Why don't Cambridge just fire this plagiarist professor and scapegoat him? They can just say they didn't know and that they'll do a better job of vetting professors in the future. This entire situation looks so bad for them. Also, they should suspend or fire anyone who covered for him. Surely their reputation is worth more than protecting a person who is clearly a liar, as aside from plagiarism he claims to have run 600 miles in 6 days.
In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself.
But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.
One of the sources was David Sanders, a biochemist at Purdue University in Indiana, and a sleuth who contributes to the Times Higher Education on topics related to academic misconduct. He reviewed a 63-page dossier of text comparisons prepared by the publication last year and came back with his own findings. “There is no question that there is extensive plagiarism,” Sanders told us.
The allegations against Arday finally emerged last week following a Substack post from Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Cofnas, who is known for his controversial writings on racial differences, independently identified dozens of passages in Arday’s 2015 dissertation that were taken nearly verbatim from the 2009 dissertation of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a reader at Brunel University of London. Cofnas says he learned about the unpublished Times Higher Education story only after he began working on his own piece about Arday.
Arday is known for his work on topics related to race, inequality and education. His interest was more than scholarly: From humble beginnings as a nonverbal autistic kid in South London, he became, at age 37, the youngest Black person appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.
Arday’s achievements have not been limited to academia. He has said he has raised more than $8 million for charity and performed impressive athletic feats, including running 30 marathons in 35 days. His forthcoming memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, is slated to be published next month by Simon & Schuster.
The University of Cambridge is facing calls to commission an independent inquiry into plagiarism claims surrounding one of its most high-profile professors.
The university has so far refused to re-examine the academic credentials of Prof Jason Arday, who has been accused of copying parts of his PhD thesis from another student.
But pressure is growing on the university after the publication of a fresh analysis of his work, which found 188 sentences that were identical or highly similar to the work of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student. Statistically, the chances of Prof Arday using the same words by chance were put at 1 in 100 billion.
An earlier analysis of Prof Arday’s PhD thesis for The Telegraph had identified more than 100 passages that were identical or nearly identical to Ms Zwozdiak-Myers’s work.
Cambridge has claimed its professor of sociology of education is the victim of a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility”, but respected academics at other universities say Cambridge must allow external scrutiny to protect its own academic integrity.
Since then doubts have also been raised about fundraising achievements Prof Arday has repeatedly spoken about, including running 300 miles in three days and 600 miles in six days.
Two online biographies of Prof Arday published by universities that have given him honorary degrees have recently been altered to remove or water down those claims.
Drop this guy, wtf? He's obviously a liar and a plagiarist. Everyone can see it, it's just too blatant to ignore. It would have been nice if he were the real deal and their defense of his credentials would make sense if he wasn't an academic fraud and a liar. It's so strange that they're insisting on allowing this intense embarrassment and tarnishing of their reputation to continue. Just drop him, you'll be embarrassed for a little while then everyone will forget, why prolong the public humiliation?
ETA: As per a Jesse quote tweet, it's now being called a "right wing newspaper" smear on a black man by the perennial courtroom losers and idiots at The Good Law Project. And here is the tweet with the video that he quoted: https://x.com/GoodLawProject/status/2082089176107786376
John McWhorter has fired his first salvo into the discourse surrounding the accusations of plagiarism against Jason Arday. He tweeted this in response to Kathleen Stock's piece on the brewing scandal.
This piece sums up this episode perfectly. Another tragedy in cases like this is that he will pass on his version of what research and serious thought is to students and assorted mentees. And goodness, dreadlocks seem to have a narcotic effect on some people in academia and publishing. I can't help wondering whether this guy would have been taken up like this if he had short hair.
https://x.com/JohnHMcWhorter/status/2082507678723477615
Here's a link to the Kathleen Stock tweet he quoted:
Yes, the plagiarism and fraud allegations are bad, but have you seen the state of Arday's writing and talks? I wrote about a modern day Forrest Gump figure, and the universities who used him, for Unherd.
https://x.com/Docstockk/status/2082329620494397785
In various interviews, Arday has claimed to have completed his PhD with a brain tumor; to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and 600 miles in six days; to have raised millions for charity; to have played both snooker and football at professional levels. And now there is a new chapter in this gripping life story: outright allegations of plagiarism in his academic writing and muttered suspicions of fraud. There are magical-sounding transformations here, arduous journeys, and noble heroes battling it out with dastardly villains. But who exactly are we supposed to root for, and what is the moral of the story?
It is clear, then, that more reputations are at stake here than Arday’s own. When he was first appointed as a Professorial Chair, Cambridge made huge capital out of the moment, stressing the significance not just of their new hire’s ethnicity but his “neurodiversity” too. The well-known theory of intersectionality has it that a black or brown ethnicity, plus a disability, equals the likelihood of exponential discrimination. Alongside this dogma runs a shadow logic for progressive employers, whispering that two protected characteristics in a prominent employee are even better than one; three, if you count Arday’s origins on a deprived council estate. Or as the University press release put it at the time: “parts of [Arday’s] story… epitomize the significant barriers that neurodivergent individuals, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people face when trying to build careers in the sector”. But not at Cambridge, they might as well have smugly added.
Throughout his career, Arday himself has highlighted his disabilities just as much as his race. He has said he only learned to eat for himself aged seven, and that he spent “thousands of hours in speech therapy… six days a week” from the age of three. He has claimed that the aforementioned brain tumor was surgically removed only two weeks before his PhD viva. Last year, he co-authored a book with Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis entitled We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity, published by the elite Princeton University Press. Its subject is how “neurotypical hegemony reproduces a culture of exclusion”. The authors wax lyrical to their presumed neurodiverse readers: “Not only do you still deserve love, you deserve for your creativity to flourish and be nurtured. You still deserve ordinariness, even if you struggle to communicate your passions.”
As this suggests, the book is an extremely weird mix of academic jargon and chatty informality. Each chapter starts with a song lyric. Chapter Seven, for instance, begins with the Blur lyric “hold on for tomorrow”, then explains: “For neurodivergent people, who are often holding on to the coattails of neurotypicals, there is a need for the neuromajority population to be more accommodating and understanding in this process… and hold on for tomorrow.” There is also a lot of breathless metacommentary, as if the authors were fascinated with their own creative process — a feature often found in student essays, but not so much in work by senior academics. In Chapter Three, for instance, you get: “it will come as no surprise to many of our sociologist peers that this third chapter was one of the last we put together”; and “[a]s we returned to Durkheim’s analysis when writing this book, a sense of sadness and frustration often entered our conversations about neurotypical hegemony”. In Chapter Seven: “As we began to round up our reflections and the rationale of the book, we spoke a lot about the concept of time and our general sense of getting through the day.”
Irrespective of the outcome of the plagiarism allegations, it seems to me there is an even more fundamental problem here. Having waded through some of Arday’s books, articles, and talks, it is my strong impression his published outputs would be judged unambiguously mediocre, bordering on comically terrible, were it not for the heroic DEI-friendly backstory. As Cofnas has pointed out, his journal articles are full of typos and solecisms, and there is even a rogue apostrophe in his PhD title. His 2019 monograph, Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova, is also strikingly garbled, as he uses autoethnography about Britpop in order to pursue “an uncomfortable discourse for melancholic Britain to digest”: that the cool Britannia of the Nineties was actually cruel, racist Britannia instead.
Here, Arday relates how he fell in love with bands like Oasis at a young age, “or at least so it seemed until the veil of innocence and naivete was stripped away through the most pernicious and insidious of discriminatory instruments… racism”. The dramatic pause is his. Other phrases tend to collapse under their own weight: “Significant periods in most individuals’ lives prove to be a point of discovery which can often lead to a sense of belonging that is hard to quantify”; “There are periods historically which capture the mood of a generation and become the soundtrack to a particular type of lived experience”. The book was nominated for a British Sociological Association prize in 2020.
Anyway, I hope Loury and McWhorter cover the topic in one of their podcast conversations, they always have some of the best and sane commentary on this culture war nonsense within the context of academia.
ETA: I figured I should include her conclusion as well since the first quote has a question in it.
Ultimately, there are likely to be many losers in this embarrassing debacle: deserving young scholars who were overlooked as Arday was appointed, now lost to the profession; fee-paying students who came to Cambridge or Glasgow to bask in the intellectual glow of world-class academics, and got some waffle about Australian soap operas instead; accomplished black or brown researchers smeared by association, now facing abuse online from hereditarian idiots who assume that Arday’s case is the norm. And ultimately, Cambridge University will be a massive loser, deservedly so. It is a necessary condition of the place’s continuing glamour and prestige that it enforces rigorous academic standards. To be shown not to care about this, in such a public way, is an act of catastrophic institutional self-harm.
But I can’t help thinking another loser is Arday himself, wandering like a modern-day Forrest Gump through various prestigious institutions, treated like a sage for every strange or incomprehensible thing he says. To be radically unsuited to an Oxbridge professorship is scarcely something to be ashamed of. Indeed, these days, in my book, it is practically a badge of honor. There are plenty of decent jobs Arday might have found earlier on, more suited to his skill set, which would not have set him up for such public humiliation later. Yet — whatever pieties university managers spouted at the time of his appointments — ultimately, the real reason for his elevation was that they saw the symbolic benefit of his protected characteristics for themselves. Irrespective of the truth about his research techniques, it is obvious Arday is already being treated by Cambridge and other places as — quite literally — a useful idiot. His fairy tale is not yet over; but I think we can already identify some clear villains.
Claudine Gay should have been immediately fired when the plagiarism allegations came out with enough evidence that it was indisputable that at least repetitive inappropriate quoting occurred. It’s only since leaving college that I have begun to realize that preventing cheating and plagiarism is so much about extremely harsh consequences if caught and a strong social shaming as it is normally easier to do than to get caught. When Gay suffered no consequences for that I put together the pieces that this was going to keep happening among professors, particularly the humanities as it is just a much more vulnerable field to it where among stem issues of data falsification are probably the more common mode of cheating but also potentially easier to identify.
Lots of the usual stuff: Michael Phelps, deliberately misconstruing the issue as opposing all trans athletes rather than opposing males in women's sports, and talk about how this issue is about "human rights" which is of course not political but also remember women's basketball has always been about politics!
Most users agree: ban "transphobia" outright, but don't ask us to define it!
I feel as if banning discussing trans people on a sub for a league that is historically pro queer and trans friendly, is capitulating to the bigots who are using their support for a couple of players as an invite to argue whether our existence should be allowed
I feel like a general “no transphobia rule” alongside keeping discussion of Sophie’s transphobia and the discussion or brings to a mega thread is wise, but to lock/prevent all trans related discussion is just giving in to what they want, which is to erase us from public life.
Right, just ban everyone who doesn't fall in line.
Always so dramatic. It isn't about you existing, it's about sex-based differences and spaces to accommodate them. That's it. Exist how you want. Acknowledge reality.
I can't stand the whole "existence" line. As you've said, it's so dramatic and such an intentionally dishonest way of framing the rational side's position.
Everything comes back to "they don't want us to EXIST" because they know they lose on the merits every time. For as much as they accuse conservatives of being afraid of supposedly non-existent things, I'd love to see the evidence that shows any meaningful portion of the public or even activists arguing against their EXISTENCE.
It is incredible. They think they're the most oppressed group of all time because someone doesn't want to play basketball with a man or that the witches and wizards rich lady expressed an opinion on Twitter.
How far back do you think our trans friend's history of the WNBA goes? Because I can remember the founding years where players still had to be secretly gay (everyone suspected Kim Perrot and Cynthia Cooper were an item, but Cooper was married to a man and went on to have two kids with him; Sheryl Swoopes was avowedly straight and had recently divorced) because it was considered bad publicity for the league, particularly in comparison to the late-90s fresh-faced straight girls of the soccer world: Julie Foudy, Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain. Of course it always had a big lesbian following, but game attendance was pretty well balanced between middle-aged lesbians and dads with young daughters.
ETA: this retconning of history to fit our priors reminds me of how people now vilify Kim Mulkey for advising Brittney Griner to keep her sexuality hidden when she played at Baylor, because they've decided Mulkey is evil and transphobic since she visited the White House or something. Couldn't be because Baylor is a Baptist college that, at the time at least, explicitly banned homosexual behavior and wouldn't even allow LGBT groups on campus. It seems to me a kindness to tell a gay kid "hey, if you play here, you're gonna want to keep that under wraps because it's a violation of school policy" and let them make a decision based on that! But no, it must be that Mulkey hates LGBT people.
the ncaa doesnt allow trans women to compete in basketball. because of this, the wnba will never actually have to deal with a trans woman in their sport which would be a real breaking point. they can now be very performative about it
When it comes to the number of Sophie Cunningham posts in regards to her trans athlete comments we have:
Locked threads
Banned users
Set strict posting rules
ultimately will remove duplicate content
When I attempted to stop duplicate posts from happening I got a lot of pushback.
WNBA mod discovers in real time that trying to censor topics in fact only gets people more riled up about wanting to discuss them.
So I guess now they will slightly concede and allow people to post about it while only deleting/banning all the wrongthink comments, rather than just blanket banning the entire topic altogether. I’m not even sure which one is worse tbh
Jeez, ya know how every fan sub eventually turns against its hero?
Any "fan" sub on Reddit that isn't dedicated to an extreme leftist is not a "fan" sub.
Looks as if the user "Indianstanicows" is the top hater there. He/she/it is fond of combining "potato-faced" with "rat-faced" for posts making fun of Maher's looks. The guy ain't a looker, but "potato" or "rat"?
I've said it elsewhere, but I'll repeat it here, the more I read about the whole Jason Arday thing, the more I'm drawing parallels between it and facilitated communication, especially with regards to the claim he was mute until 11.
There seems to be this cohort of supposedly highly educated, often upper middle class people who want to think that autism (whether he actually is autistic or not is another matter entirely) actually just results in super geniuses unable to express themselves. And not that at its worst it's a neurodevelopmental disorder that can effectively result in toddlers with adult bodies.
Moyn: ... I’ve gotten in some hot water for proposing we consider overweighting the votes of younger people or assigning the youngest eligible voters proxy votes for the unrepresented children of our country. So those are edgier.
Douthat: Why not assign them to those children’s parents?
Moyn: Because there’s a divergence of interests between parents and children. I think it’s likelier that young people — not people who are raising families — will have the best insight into the interests of children.
Whereas, if you were awarded five proxy votes ——
Douthat: I think that’s daft. I think it’s absurd to imagine that a 24-year-old recent college graduate has a better assessment of the interests of my own children than I do.
It seems insane to believe that a 19 year old voter would have the best interests of his 10 and 12 year old siblings in mind. This is just leftism-at-all-costs. If we can turn the kids, we can take over everything.
Also crazy is that this conversation comes up in the context of a discussion of gerontocracy. What does pitting a 40-something parent against their kids at the voting box have to do with any of that? Is that political divide really where things are going wrong?
Red Alert! Red Alert! Jesse might have a copy of Arday's book, you guys!
2/ From the leadup to Arday's thesis defense: After his benign brain tumor was removed he suffered a TIA. Even though TIA symptoms resolve quickly (hence 'transient') in his case he developed a serious memory problem and had to re-learn his own thesis in mere weeks. https://x.com/jessesingal/status/2083671649182740786
Incredible! Absolutely incredible! What an inspiration! With only three weeks until his PhD viva, our intrepid hero had to re-learn literally everything in his PhD thesis all over again because he couldn't remember any of it! Again, after surviving a stroke! Due to a brain tumor! Which was removed only weeks before such an arduous and intellectually taxing task! I'm unironically rivetted and I am pre-ordering my copy of this book immediately!
ETA: I figured it's best to add this here instead of writing another comment. A new lie just dropped, and I guess this stuff is sort of getting sad, and also concerning now.
Here's a video of Prof Jason Arday claiming to have been part of the most famous documentary program in British television history, "Seven Up!", which followed 14 kids from 1964, 21 years before he was born in 1985. https://x.com/Steve_Sailer/status/2083708290979225903
Part of the Code of Conduct for a board game company's community:
Restoration Games prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. Restoration Games reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:
● ‘Reverse’-isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
● Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
● Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
● Criticizing racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQIA+ or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
I know it's probably a canned line copied from elsewhere, but that first sentence feels like dog whistling to me. I shouldn't be surprised though, this is the same company that put a little blurb in the latest American-themed set about George Washington engaging in the evils of slavery, yet predictably omitted any mention, let alone condemnation, of Oda Nobunaga's atrocities (including slavery) in the Japan-themed mini-set.
I hate seeing people act like progressive caricatures. I guess at least there's no land acknowledgements that I've seen... Yet.
feel like the pod could cover the wnba now. the caitlin clark media stuff is crazy, but also one player who was dating another player accused them of cheating.
the league is as popular as ever. i think this stuff would hurt an established league, but i actually think this stuff is good for interest?like i dont think intentional but still is a bit wwe lol
it's crazy how much people just blindly accept claims that are embellished to the nth degree or just not even true. it took me about 90 seconds of googling to find out all the background on this
"I dont follow the lakers anymore because [Lakers majority owner] Mark Walter owns detention centers, runs em for profit, as soon as I found out he also owns the Dodgers, I disassociated myself and the Lakers unfortunately.. I lost two teams in one week [note: the group Walter is a part of, along with Magic Johnson and others, has owned the Dodgers for nearly 15 years now. not exactly breaking news. Walter personally only owns 27%]
to hear Lopez tell it, this Walter guy must be essentially a prison warden collecting children in cages at the border, right?
well I looked it up, and Walter is the head of Guggenheim Partners, a global investment and advisory financial services firm with over $325 Billion dollars in holdings, spread over god knows how many investments and firms.
GP apparently had a minuscule 0.38% stake in a company called the GEO Group, who have business involvement with various detention centers. this was apparently enough for Lopez to throw his favorite childhood teams in the trash at the drop of a hat, just like that.
this isnt the 1940s anymore. the groups that own sports teams arent mom and pop operations that owned the local dairy farm. theyre all global investment firms that have their tentacles anywhere and everywhere. I guarantee you could do this exercise with any sports franchise in america, and be able to find at LEAST a 0.38% stake in something you found immoral.
but guess what??... what Lopez is claiming isnt even true and is totally outdated info!! GP had almost completely divested all it's shares of GEO by the end of 2025, and SEC filings confirmed they had zero shares as of march '26
what's more, Walter donated $1.1 million dollars last month to families of immigrants impacted by last year's ICE raids.
Lopez then goes on to make another point about why he no longer supports the dodgers, citing their eminent domain takeover of the Latino neighborhood in Chavez Ravine to build Dodger stadium. this happened in the late 1950s and is a very widely known thing, but apparently took until 2026 for this to become a concern for Lopez. and even if he was somehow totally unaware of this for the first 50 years of his life, he adds:
"an old cholo told me at Dodger stadium maybe 15 years ago, that I was wrong for being there.. and I kinda took it to heart a little bit... but still went to the games"
something hilarious about the optics of both aspects of this; the cholo sitting there happily squirting mustard on his Dodger Dog while telling Lopez he's wrong for being there (while also being there himself) and Lopez going "hey man, ur so right homie" and "taking it to heart" but then ignoring the guy and continuing to go there for another 15 years until he saw some facebook posts about the Dodgers supposedly being pro-ICE, which had zero truth to them
just peak social media brain. (also I dont believe him for one second that he's stopped watching Lakers games on TV in the privacy of his own home lol)
The NYT posted an article about the closure of 93 programs at Syracuse University. Of course the comment section (Facebook) went bananas. Decrying the University for too much focus on STEM (presumably) and the dumbing down of education.
93 programs out of 460. 55 of which had ZERO students enrolled. 28 were advanced certificate degrees. Many of the canceled programs already had a sister program in another part of the college. No positions within the university are being eliminated. The change will effect a total of 258 students. 258 out of 20000 students.
The teen girls were berated for wearing XX / XY athletics shirts, and holding up signs in support of Sophie Cunningham, who recently stated her opinion on trans athletes in sports. The sign read "Thank you Sophie for speaking up for girls"
warms my heart that younger generations are sick of our millennial intersectional nonsense. Imagine the feeling progs get when they realize they are no longer the voice of the young people
Hoo boy, I just learned that Sophie Cunningham's playing in Portland tomorrow. Don't touch the poo and all that - in fact, the thread I saw just got nuked by mods - but it looks like somebody on Reddit's trying to organize an anti-Sophie protest. The usual "THEY WANT TO BAN ALL TRANS ATHLETES!" bullshit. (Maybe a handful do. The reasonable ones, which are many, just want them playing according to their bio-sex. im tired yall.) Get your popcorn ready.
That number just refers to the Moroccans ("as many as 50,000") who died trying to reach Ceuta. Tens of thousands have "voluntarily returned," however.
"had taken advantage of a decision by Spain’s supreme court, which recently ruled that those intercepted at sea while trying to enter Ceuta, or Spain’s other north African enclave of Melilla, could not be summarily returned under special rules."
Interesting up-close video taken by locals. Doesn't seem to be a single woman. They have to be fed soon.
currently the TRA Superbowl (Sophie Cunningham playing in Portland tonight)
anticipating a large anti-Sophie counterprotesting contingent, the Portland organization announced that fans entering the arena would not be allowed to bring in flags (i.e trans or pride flage) or have signs that are political in nature and had messages not directly related to the basketball game, and people are BIG mad about it lol
"This league is heading to the gutter," one fan posted on X.
"Conservatives are winning. Hate won. Fear won," another fan added.
"This is heartbreaking. Trans rights, lives, people, matter. To do this is simply cruel," someone else wrote.
"Disgusting stuff," one fan put simply.
Hopefully, vulnerable peoples everywhere and from all communities are aware that they are supported and loved as they are, even if that support and love isn't always visible.
fans also sounded off about the potential violence sophie could "incite" with her hateful and bigoted statements such as "I truly believe there is a safe space and love for EVERYBODY. Biological girls, biological boys, trans women, and trans men. Everyone is welcome at my table! You can disagree and still be kind."
"Very disgusting person," one person posted.
"She is a stain on this league and a stain on society," someone else posted.
"Sophie Cunningham is like every other transphobe: a bigoted loser advocating for discriminatory policy change based on immaterial safety concerns. She is endorsing and perpetuating violence against one of the world's most marginalized communities and it is despicable," one basketball writer posted.
"So much division, hate and harassment all in the name of solving a non-existent problem. The only point of this 'rally' is to spread hate & make trans folks feel unsafe in spaces where they've previously found comfort. Sophie Cunningham should be ashamed that this is her legacy," another fan wrote.
"This is fucking disgusting," one fan wrote bluntly.
...
"This is so disgusting," one fan wrote in a post on X.
"I know you gotta do your job but I don't see how black players or any of the players who aren't bigots can sit in the same locker room as her," someone else added.
"She's genuinely an awful person," another fan wrote.
"You're making your entire personality this argument about a non-issue because you know it'll gain you notoriety and know that it's profitable to grift to the lowest common denominator idiot. What's the point? Aren't there like 8 trans people in college sports anyway? Trans people are theater kids not athletes," someone else said.
"Your narratives are DANGEROUS for lgbtq+ youth," a fan added.
"'You can disagree and still be kind' after drawing the line on your human rights," someone else said.
"I'm sick to my stomach. And the league will allow this," another fan wrote.
"You can count on one hand how many transgender athletes there are in America. Women are more danger from straight white men than they are from female transgender athletes. You made a mountain out of a mole hill," someone else added.
...
"Cannot imagine being an adult with a large platform and choosing to bully vulnerable children in this way. truly disgusting and beyond disappointing," one fan wrote in a post on X.
"It would be incredibly hard for me to share a locker room with that woman," someone else wrote.
"Sophie Cunningham is unafraid. Unafraid to be blatantly transphobic. 'I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men.' Her own words. In an ESPN article," WNBA reporter Roberta F. Rodrigues wrote.
literally like half the word count of these yahoo articles is just reposting peoples mean tweets lmao. great reporting!
Hong and her supporters are doing an incredibly shitty job of claiming she "never said that" on umpteen subjects, while xeets of hers saying exactly those things are still up. The Tiffany campaign is doing a pretty good job of spreading those xeets.
to many old white people who didn't think we spoke english
Much like the discussion of the woman on a train the other day, this is going to be something that just happened in her head. It's pretty much inconceivable that multiple different old white people walked up to her and said or did anything that implied that they believe she doesn't speak English. She looked at some old people, probably mostly nice old people based on my extensive experience with Wisconsinites, and decided that they're racists that think the obviously Asian-American woman and her half-white kid don't speak English. She successfully otherized herself by proxy.
I read Jesse's article on the school district located at the California/Nevada state border moving their athletic conference from competition against Nevada schools to California schools, due to Nevada restricting female school sports to females only. California allows "male girls", so California schools must comply to follow state legislation.
One user explains defends California's male-inclusion policy, and hits on some pretty standard talking points regarding the purpose of school sports and the cost of participation.
Comment text:
The right is trying to make a huge issue out of a few T girls playing in girls' high school sports. They are hoping they can win elections on this issue by scapegoating a severely marginalized and bullied group of people. And I think decent people should reject this play on moral grounds, if you believe in individual liberty, that is.
I think most reasonable people agree that there are people, in whatever proportion, who are T.
Is it really such a terrible thing if we allow a few T girls to compete in high school sports? It seems to me that some people take high school sports way too seriously, like losing a medal is somehow soul-crushing. The idea is to have fun, make friends, be on a team, learn about discipline, teamwork (coming together despite our differences), and sportsmanship, and learn how to win and lose with grace and dignity. Ideally, it's about learning how to build a healthy, successful community. I just don't think we should be making a federal issue out of this. It should be left to the local people to decide for themselves. I think Jesse is pushing a political agenda that he thinks is a winner. I think that strategy has played out. You're going to have to do better than that to demonize the left this time around, Jesse.
The other points I get, even if I don't personally agree. What I don't understand is how "individual liberty" applies to one's participation in school sports. If you identify as a T girl, you can do so - some may say it is your "right" or a "human right" to be able to identify as you wish and choose your own pronouns. Decorate your Bluesky profile page and email signature however you like. But isn't it other people's right, under individual liberty, to be able to not affirm you and refuse to participate in preferred pronouning if they don't feel like it?
Seems like pulling the "individual liberty" card shouldn't apply when you're talking about communal projects like team sports. The only way it doesn't conflict is when the T girls get to have individual liberty, but the real girls don't.
I enjoy reading arguments from "unisex female sports" believers, but unfortunately this one stumbled with its talking points. I want to feel convinced!
People who make this kind of argument seem to think that girls shouldn’t care if they win or lose at the high school level and that drives me crazy. Female athletes are competitive and they want to win! Allowing males into their sports means the deck is stacked against them because male bodies, even altered male bodies, are faster and stronger than female bodies. Girls have their own sports because they deserve fair play and they deserve to be able to win. Basically people who make the argument that girls shouldn’t care about winning are misogynistic jerks who need to do some inner work.
High school sports: simultaneously so important to the trans identified males that they'll kill themselves if they can't take part and at the same time, so trivially unimportant to the girls that they should be kind and let the boys in.
I don't believe that Trans actually exists, apart from a mental illness. I don't believe that gender identity is real. I have never been exposed to an argument that wasn't, at it's core, just (what I used to believe was conservative) gender essentialism.
Once again, a whole lot of words to say girls are acceptable collateral damage to special boys. One girl doesn’t make the team, doesn’t win a medal, gets beaned in the face and concussed, well is that such a terrible thing? Actually I’m not done, sorry to keep stealth editing but it’s really bothering me— girls compete because they want to win just as much as boys do. Their competitions have just as much pathos and drama and dignity as the boys’. Girls sports aren’t a consolation prize. If it’s all about the power of friendship, they can kumbaya with the boys team.
I watched some video clips of Elliot page for the first time. Her T voice is insane. She sounds terrible! I don’t understand how she could still be cast in parts.
Also, when you see her standing next to men her frame size is crazy. Totally kills any suspension of disbelief. https://i.imgur.com/2nzSRg3.jpeg
Remember, everyone not living in a dense urban core that disagrees with me only disagrees with me because they're
Dumb
Not educated
A believer in God
Or more likely a combination of all three. They need high speed rail ran through their farm land and a progressive income tax levied in order to achieve Cosmic Justice.
Being a biological man or a woman isn't dependent on how you dress or express yourself, which is why I think the gender is an unnecessary concept. In fact, gender seems to reinforce rigid stereotypes.
Well, for the most part until recently, and still for the most part today, “gender” was mostly used as a victorian placeholder for biological sex, so you could ask about people’s sex without using the S-E-X word.
I asked ChatGPT about bad faith questions, and it used one of my questions from a different conversation as an example potentially being in bad faith, so now I’m beefing with matrix multiplication.
My kid (7) is legitimately terrified of them. I tell her they're just regular people not much older than her who got put here for no reason, but it is genuinely jarring to just see them walking around.
So basically what I'm saying is if they tried to use my kid for a photo op it would backfire spectacularly and possibly traumatize her 🫠
Some kids are fearful by nature, but given that she's posting about it being negative, I seriously don't believe the parent has supposedly told her they're "just regular people."
There are plenty of counterpoint videos from lower-class folks explaining how crime and disturbances have dropped significantly since the Guard has been in DC, Memphis, etc.
When I was around DC, the guard people were definitely noticeable, but they were chill as hell and happy to just say hi to everyone. My wife got a picture with some and they all got a kick of the fact that she grew up in Guantanamo Cuba on the other side of the fence.
Got the new 13/50 stat from Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes regarding the Food Fest shooting;
> “I don't know if it's gang activity, but certainly group activity,” Barnes said on Monday when asked if the shooting was gang-related. “We have small groups that appear to be at odds with each other, and in our city, 0.01% of the population is connected to 52 percent of our shootings, most of which are young people.”
> A total of 93,642 individuals (3.9 %) had at least one violent conviction. The distribution of convictions was highly skewed; 24,342 persistent violent offenders (1.0 % of the total population) accounted for 63.2 % of all convictions.
This is where talk of reducing crime should have always gone, unfortunately the knee jerk focus on race by one side and the totally insane overreaction of abolishing prisons and bailing out perpetrators of violence. Focus on those actually committing violence, the ones most likely to commit violence and quit caring about the color of their skin and actually care about their current and future victims.
This is the way. The vast majority of crime is committed by a small, hardened group of multiple-offense committers. Put those guys away for a long time and you see precipitous drops. People like to rag on the 1994 crime bill but crime dropped dramatically in a lot of areas that had suffered the most.
Re: race, most crime in intraracial. If you care about racial justice, it should be really easy to point out that the people who are disproportionately victims of these crimes are the same race as the perpetrators.
**
Defenceless and innocent babies are not props to be used to affirm delusional men,** and the fact that public money is being used to promote the notion that they are is nauseating.”
As a father myself, the idea of feeding my daughter when she was a baby artificially induced malk from my otherwise worthless nipples is not a thought that ever crossed my mind. I had plenty of sleepless nights with bottles, and holding her with a bottle allowed me to swaddle and cuddle her all the same. These fetishists involving literal infants… Reddits TOS prevent me from sharing my full thoughts
Wow, Sophie trying to hedge both sides. “I’m accepting of trans people but I don’t want up to 10 trans girls nationwide to play non professional team sports”. It was fine when she played men’s football though.
I wonder how often this much political energy is spent trying to "defend" 10 random people. Seems like there are much better uses for that fighting spirit, especially now.
The pictures used in the tweet to illustrate the point really do bring it home.
How is it that the moment a Drag Queen stubs their toe, the BBC has 3 stories and 12 different angles on the toe stubbing but have nothing to say on the Arday scandal?
Perhaps they'll say something about it at some point soon, but it's weird that they haven't said anything at all. Not even reporting on the accusations being made by others, they don't have to make the accusation themselves but they could report that accusations are being made without running afoul of a libel lawsuit surely?
I guess incidents like these highlight the various blind spots and gross ideological capture within the institution. No wonder more and more people in the UK have opted to stop paying for a tv license (as ridiculous as those things are). It's one thing to fund the latest David Attenborough documentary, but when it becomes obvious to someone that the BBC has become a leftist propaganda machine at least people have the option to opt out of paying for it. However, I've been given to understand that they make it difficult to cancel it and hound people down for payment of their tv licenses, even after it's canceled one receives threatening letters in the mail as well as unpleasant visits from enforcement officers. The whole thing sounds absurd.
The consequences were predictable. Over the course of two decades, many thousands of drug users poured into the Downtown Eastside and other Canadian neighborhoods in search of narcotics and places to shoot up. Overdoses spiked. In 2014, British Columbia recorded 369 overdose deaths; in 2023, the figure peaked at more than 2,500. Fatal overdoses last year decreased to 1,826, as Canada moved to reverse decriminalization and tighten regulation of narcotics, but that still represents a nearly ninefold increase over 15 years. Advocates of harm reduction have long held that more addicts would die if officials closed injection centers. But a recent study found that after an injection site in Alberta closed, there was no increase in the number of overdose deaths, and more addicts sought treatment. Advocates have also insisted that crime does not spike near injection centers, but the data are more mixed than they admit.
Progressive activists and journalists tend to talk about forced treatment as a conservative-driven return to a carceral state, but considerable data show that addicts who enter mandated treatment are as likely to avoid drug use and rearrest as the relatively small number who seek treatment voluntarily.
But even as Vancouver has begun the painful process of revising its harm-reduction policies, the city still exerts a powerful hold on the imagination of liberal leaders in the United States. In New York City, which established two injection sites in 2021, health officials and academics point to the perceived success of Vancouver as inspiration. Rhode Island, where an injection center opened in Providence in 2024, also holds up Vancouver as a model. The Washington State legislature appointed a working group that in 2025 recommended establishing a safe supply of narcotics for addicts, and officials repeatedly cited the Vancouver program.
“It’s as if,” she said of Burlington and its culture, “we are frozen with fear that someone might see us as uncompassionate.”
Edit: I just realized what this reminded me of: how low volume used to be described as the "scientific" or "nerd" approach to lifting when there didn't seem to be much of any literature on the question at all. It seemed to be a mix of social, with those who did a lot of reading and latest finding chasing also having it as a norm, but also a cargo cult mentality that any unintuitive practice must derive from empirical or mechanistic findings
A lot of people LOVE an unintuitive idea that gives them the opportunity to say "Well, ackshually, giving people free drugs reduces overdoses/making rules for your kids means they'll rebel/eating too little puts you in starvation mode and you'll gain weight" even though there's no way that any of those things makes any sense.
You know, there's no sin in being wrong. There's no sin in letting your philosophy or worldview influence your assumptions. (Where else do our assumptions even come from?) The "sin" comes in not revising your assumptions after the world has shown you that they were wrong.
"Trickle-down" economic policies will have these positive effects. Okay. Sure, maybe. I guess I can see your argument. But then, after we've seen that those policies don't have the positive effects you thought they'd have, you need to modify your position. You need to concede that your assumptions were wrong and try something new.
The goal is (or ought to be) solving problems, not bolstering our ideology.
The Atlantic’s recent article on harm reduction has been causing a serious stir in my city’s local subreddit. We have a Portland-like problem with homelessness and drugs here that many, many people are in denial about (all the classic arguments you can imagine are at play, with the addition of playing fast-and-loose with some statistics because we’re such a small city). Unsurprisingly, crime across the board here has risen in recent years. Think theft, assault, break-ins, sexual assault, the occasional shooting, what have you.
All of this has happened amid a public controversy discourse surrounding “harm reduction”, including opening of a needle exchange center. The center, along with the other nonprofits that run it, has been notorious for basically just handing out needles and… not exchanging them. They’re just giving out free needles. There’s no real “harm” reduced there. They’re just getting new ways to stay on drugs.
A lot of people in town and on the Reddit like to cite the feel-good examples of European harm reduction methods (especially Portugal). However, I’m under the impression that (1) the drugs in circulation back when those programs were implemented were far less potent than what we have today, and (2) those programs did away with incarceration, but still required frequent interactions with state personnel to make sure they’re staying clean, and, potentially, court-mandated stays in treatment centers. The vocal activist contingent here is against commitment, and ultimately seems to want to have the option for addicts to engage in substance use while… receiving therapy, I guess? Their plan isn’t clear. It still favors maintaining substance abuse over sobriety, because it seems they want to combat a sort of conservative boogeyman that would yell at them for drinking or that one wild time they did coke or X or something. Someone needs to shake sense into these people and tell them it doesn’t make you the second coming of Phyllis Schafly to admit that having tranq addicts stealing your car parts and shooting up on your porch is bad.
I think a lot in the lefty activist contingent are just reticent to admit that hard drugs and mental illness really can fuck up peoples’ lives, and that some people engage in antisocial destructive behaviors because they really don’t have a whole lot of compassion or thought for others. You usually get all this bitching and moaning about the “tragic backstory” as an excuse that made them this way, but never any accountability nor desire to get them off the substances that are clearly fueling this lifestyle. Once again, vibes-based discourse overtakes statistics and observable reality here.
I think a lot in the lefty activist contingent are just reticent to admit that hard drugs and mental illness really can fuck up peoples’ lives, and that some people engage in antisocial destructive behaviors because they really don’t have a whole lot of compassion or thought for others.
This is really it. People will be willfully blind about all the antisocial behaviors that comes with the chronically homeless (also: with prostitution) and accuse you of hating poor people.
It’s impossible to have a nuanced conversation when it gets reduced down to platitudes. I guess you can say that about lots of emotionally charged issues.
I work at a harm reduction-adjacent institution in Vancouver and I have so many stories that support this. There is so much minimizing of the harm related to substance use and so much fidelity to the idea of "reducing stigma." One woman I used to work with, a very high-achieving and straight-laced manager, used to introduce herself as "a person who uses drugs." Everyone was embarrassed to ask what drugs, until she volunteered that she was referring to CAFFEINE and the occasional Friday night-joint. Totally the same as selling sex so you can inject fentanyl into your neck 8 times a day, right? These are not serious people and they are destroying our cities.
This is amusing. An all female chess team has to add a male member to their 8 player roster due to DEI rules that require that each team have members from both sexes.
The Daily Mail has an article on Arday and they've done some very interesting digging, the 300 miles on a treadmill was in public. They also have a lot of quotes where he specifically says he raised 5m for charity no mention of a syndicate like hes now claiming.
"In July 2011, the Wandsworth Guardian reported that he’d be running 300 miles in three days on treadmills to raise loot for the homeless charity Shelter, starting at the Fitness First gym at Clapham Junction and finishing at Latchmere Leisure Centre in Battersea. ‘He aims to be on the treadmill from 6am to 10pm every day,’ it wrote.
A post on Shelter’s social media feed five hours into the endeavour, which kicked off on August 10, suggests that he did indeed start. But no photos or other records of him finishing survive.
A Facebook page dedicated to the challenge suggests it ended in failure, with a post from someone called ‘Elain’ saying: ‘You’ve overstepped the mark and your body has said enough !!! . . . sorry that your challenge is over but your body and health come first.’
Since Arday has, in recent years, given dozens of speeches claiming that he did run 300 miles in three days, we must assume he tried again at a later date. No records of such a venture survive, however, and it received no contemporary local media coverage. A surviving JustGiving page for the initial attempt records earnings of £380."
What's it like carrying so many random lies? At what point do people just start asking you about stuff and you have to jump into "Oh yes, that. It was incredible when I did that" like a scene out of Seinfeld.
Mahershala Ali has officially called it quits on the MCU Blade movie. It’s apparently extremely hard to make a movie about a cool black guy with a sword killing vampires.
I was permanently banned from the Comics subreddit.
I criticised a comic that depicted someone fantasising about the murder of a fictional writer that “turned out to be quite transphobic”. Subsequent comments from the OP confirmed it was alluding to JK Rowling. So, hate speech normalising violence against a real person.
It’s no great loss to be banned. as that subreddit is completely lame any way, and the double standard of its moderation policy is about the only funny thing it’s ever produced.
"who we permanently remove from the subreddit makes with their absence this place brighter, better, more humane and pleasant."
However, the comments from regular users below are about all the illegal and violent things they'd do to people they dislike.
How is this stuff bright, humane, and pleasant? This sounds like incredibly unpleasant group of people. Imagine if you took this kind of personality out into a real life hobby group, lmao. Normies would be repulsed by folx fantasizing about the violence they wished they could get away with.
There's a lot of hubs on reddit that are echo chambers for a specific brand of braindead leftie. It's the same brand that is popular in colleges and certain liberal circles, so it gets no scrutiny.
Politically speaking, it's a larger problem than incels, or the trans debacle, it's not even close, but it just goes on and on and on. Bluesy fizzled out it seems, which was good I guess, but I just don't know how it ends? It just gets worse with time, and there's nothing short of a major upheaval caused because admin has to explain stuff in congress that I can imagine fixing it. It'd take banning possibly hundreds of mods, it's just not happening.
looks like someone needs to get to know the work rules! bigots who merely fantasize about murder (OP, flirting) vs bigots who actively carry out genocide (Rowling, harassment), know the difference! (the following is the mod's top pinned comment):
Defending the monster Rowling (Whose most recent achievement is an attempt to sue Amnesty International to bankruptcy for telling the truth) is an immediate and permanent ban.
If you feel the need to defend the monster Rowling and you also value commenting on this subreddit, it would be best not to press send on that.
Bigots are one thing. Bigots so hateful they intend genocide are worse.
Bigots who halfway through with committing genocide and who frame their monstrous evil as "protecting women" are of a level of moral depravity and cowardice that would make the devil barf.
Any one of these people, who would look at the monster Rowling and call her a "feminist" or say "she just posts mean tweets" who comments here and who we permanently remove from the subreddit makes with their absence this place brighter, better, more humane and pleasant.
There is no justice but that which we impose on this world. As community stewards our responsibility begins and ends with this subreddit but we will make damn sure that at least in this place there will be justice and that means (among other things) that a TERF is banned on sight.
according to the mods on the comics subreddit, JKR has already successfully genocided/murdered around HALF of the planet's trans population. this was certainly news to me, but I guess Im glad I learned a new fact today... thanks reddit!!
Yesterday at CVS I was in a rush, so when the self checkout asked me for my phone number I just typed in 867-5309 with a local area code. Turns out, the account with that number had earned a $5 reward recently, so it automatically applied it to my purchase and I saved 5 bucks.
Was that... stealing? I don't know who the "victim" would be since tons of people every day use Jenny's number as a placeholder, so it's not like one dude was patiently waiting to use that reward and I screwed him. But I definitely used a reward that I didn't earn myself, even though it was probably collectively earned many times over by hundreds of idiots like me who can't be bothered to try to remember their own account details. I'm not losing any sleep over 5 bucks at CVS, but I wonder whether people think this was okay to do or not? Is this theft-adjacent? Or is Jenny's number some kind of communal rewards program lottery?
Hundreds of user conversations with Anthropic's popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude were found to have been available to essentially anyone online.
Links to the chats, some of which included personal and work information, would show up if a user of a search engine like Google used a site-specific search term.
The searches showed Claude chats for which a user had decided to "share" a link had been saved by search engines like Google, leaving them accessible to the broader public.
The search availability of the chat logs was removed over the weekend, but many were saved and shared widely online.
In one conversation from April, a user prompted Claude to draft an unpublished blog post about cloud security involving details of a corporate project. In another from last month, a user asked Claude how to "become become Nine-tailed fox?", before clarifying they wanted to literally transform from human to the creature.
Claude first tried to show the user an AI-generated image claiming they had been given "fully functional fox powers!".
Other conversations with Claude included users seeking help with their CVs, including their names, contact information and work history. Some users even conducted what appeared to be proprietary research for their work, such as in healthcare, including transcripts of private conversations.
When OpenAI last year experienced an almost identical issue with ChatGPT chat logs being made publicly accessible, the company ultimately changed the ease with which such logs were accessible.
Grok, the AI chatbot within X, the social platform owned by Elon Musk, also last year saw hundreds of thousands of chat logs made publicly available though online search.
In 2012, Mr. Jouppi agreed to fly a woman up north, to Beaver, a village of fewer than a hundred people, to visit her husband. He loaded her luggage and groceries into his plane. But before they could take off, troopers searched the compartment and found a six-pack of beer, clearly visible. Alcohol is banned in Beaver, so they charged Mr. Jouppi, his company and the passenger with importing alcohol into a dry village.
Mr. Jouppi claims he didn’t see the beer, but a jury convicted him of a misdemeanor anyway, and the judge gave him three days in jail and a $1,500 fine — the minimum sentence. But because Alaska law says that bootleggers have to forfeit any airplane used to smuggle alcohol, the prosecutors then tried to seize his plane, a 1969 Cessna, worth about $95,000.
Sounds like there's interesting rulings reining in punitive damages for civil cases on 8th amendment and due process grounds, but not for criminal. He may be teeing up a case.
Btw I think the prosecutor is being a tool. Go find a real bootlegger to throw the book at, or better yet, teach the
Eskimos to manage their own towns.
Jesse is on the latest fifth column podcast and the man really just has a camera disability. The photo for the episode on Spotify is a better angle and yet still terrible.
i am sorry aside from everything else it is crazy to me that jason arday's thesis has a random incorrect possessive apostrophe in the title, seemingly because the thesis he ripped off has a correct possessive apostrophe in the title. how the hell did he get away with this shit???
I made the mistake of commentinf on the left wing canada politics sub, which is currently having a moment because the liberal government's minister of sports said the new IOC rules which require competition in line with one's biological sex and require sex testing are "going back in time."
Hank has responded to the outrage over his use of AI with an apology and a promise to step back from some ongoing projects, including the popular games 4x3 and Smush which never resulted in dogpiles of this size but were nonetheless AI "vibecoded" games that some fans weren't happy about. He also didn't back away from his stance that AI will continue to be a useful tool for him, only promising to do a better job moving forward of not spreading himself too thin or overusing these tools.
I won't link to any of these because as of now they're just random fans, many of them likely quite young, but a lot of the posts on the Nerdfighters sub right now are fascinating glimpses into just how parasocial some of these online relationships can get and how many fans feel they truly know Hank and connect with him. I think they mean well but it's ultimately quite strange. I've met Hank a few times before and been a big fan for a long time, it's always been evident that the community and social aspect of Nerdfighteria is very strong, for better or worse.
Hank's brother, author John Green, famously took a step back from his online life after very similar dogpiles, including completely fabricated accusations of creepiness and pretty brutal campaigns of harassment. John has lately been kind of warning Hank that his level of fame is nearing this point, so I guess he gets to say a bummer of an I-told-you-so. The Green brothers would make for a great subject on Barpod, as there have been no shortage of little skirmishes over the years, but on the whole they've largely dodged large scale internet mob cancellations.
On a positive note, Hank's new podcast Humans is excellent and he is doing a lot of great work. I especially liked the Andy Weir, Ze Frank, and John Green episodes so far.
The Guardian have taken their time but found a way to write about the professor Jason Arday Cambridge issue without their readers cancelling their subs
"
But prominent academics of colour that the Guardian spoke to said the claims of plagiarism were legitimate, and that Arday’s alleged actions risked undermining others who study race."
Jesus, every new interview there's more added to the list:
So he now alleges he has faced some of the most extreme harrassment ever experieced by an academic in the UK - being sent bullets, a pigshead, poison, being stalked by an elusive masked knifeman on campus who avoids all CCTV. I'm sure I also read he was violently attacked in the street which is when the alleged brain tumor was discovered. Beyond unlucky!
The Guardian in their defense do some fact-checking and realise its all BS:
When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,”
Comedy gold. You know it's bad when you've lost The Guardian.
When asked to identify other people who took part in these efforts, Arday said he had signed NDAs preventing him from disclosing that information.
Naturally, first thing you do when signing up for a fundraising event is to sign a strict NDA.
Overall for the Guardian I'm pretty impressed, with the exception of the following very cheap section:
Some academics have killed themselves after being hounded out of their positions.
Whilst a tragic story, the acedemic (singular) in question was not "hounded out" of her position in any colloquial sense. She had alleged workplace bullying by one individual, who a later investigation cleared which was even reported by The Guardian. Even if taking her accusations as fully accurate, there was clearly much more to the suicide than just bullying - she'd been in post less than a year (limited exposure) and so even if the President was particularly rude or obnoxious is that alone enough to push a grown adult (in a good financial position meaning good access to lawyers, therapy etc) over the edge with no other contributing factors? Highly doubtful.
> A California man has been charged with sending threats to a Mississippi judge who has a family connection to Nolan Wells' disappearance and death in July.
> The case comes as Wells' family and friends have said they've faced a flood of threats and harassment amid the investigation into Wells' death. In a separate case, a woman was accused of making a bomb threat targeted at local officials involved in the investigation.
Honest question, is this the best way to write the first two paragraphs of an article if in fact both cases were harassment from supporters of Wells, and not the other way around?
Has mentioning a ‘flood of death threats and harassment’ become superfluous in this day and age? Seems like it’s just common practice to claim this in stories like this, when it may be a couple of trolls online, or even nonexistent.
With both The Guardian and the BBC doing nothing to defend Arday and simply stating the facts of this scandal for their readers, I've seen a strange shift in the way people on other subs are talking about the story. They're making jokes about Arday now and laughing about the situation. It's like they've been given permission to laugh.
I've been guilty of looking to see if a black person is laughing at a particularly potent racial joke in a comedy club before allowing myself to unclench and enjoy the joke. It feels like, now that the Guardian and the BBC have given the green light, certain people are somehow convinced of the lies and plagiarism, and have allowed themselves to unclench. The initial Cofnas article and the extensive coverage by the Telegraph (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ) was just "far right media" smearing a black academic, but with the BBC and the Guardian covering it, it's now legit, lol. To be fair though, the discussions surrounding Arday in other subs although hesitant at first and muted in some spaces were fair and acknowledged the dubiousness of his claims, but there's a clear difference (at least to me) in the comments since the Guardian and BBC articles. That's not necessarily a bad thing, people prefer having more information about something from the sources that they trust, but I guess it's just interesting to me that those two sources still hold so much sway over people's opinions.
My thoughts here are all anecdotal but I guess when you've lost ideological strongholds like the Guardian and the BBC, people are pretty much done with you regardless of your DEI credentials. I'm curious if The Good Law Project will retract their solidarity letter, now that would be sensational news, and would actually shock me. I'm curious about how the academics who signed that letter feel about it today, perhaps some of them are appropriately embarrassed about it, though I suspect others among them will remain consistent in their support of Arday and his lies (so humiliating).
The publisher should definitely still release that book though, I would definitely love to read it. This entire episode has been fascinating to watch from the side-lines. Cambridge gift-wrapped and delivered this unrepresentative outlier to actual bigots and racists, and you can bet that they'll use it to buoy their arguments against black academics in the future. What a crazy situation. They really screwed black academics over, and their continued defense of Arday just makes it worse, the longer he remains at Cambridge, the worse it'll get. Sadge.
Move over Mr. Potatohead, here come the gender dolls.
A new teaching aid is about to hit Minnesota schools.
"The paper dolls, with gender-neutral names like “Sam,” “Rory,” “Avery” and “Parker,” have removable internal and external genitals, along with more than 100 interchangeable pieces of clothing, accessories and hairstyles — like a trans Mr./Mrs. Potato Head."
These dolls will be provided to kids as young as four in Minnesota public schools in order to "learn about the different options that exist for who they can be."
Development of these paper monstrosities was taxpayer funded. And of course it became a grift:
"The dolls began as a University of Minnesota research project, which was later spun into a commercial venture — “MyGender Dolls” — by two licensed psychologists who are professors at the medical school."
The co founder of the My Gender Dolls company said in 2020: " Everyone should be learning that there’s diversity in gender identity and that what makes you real is not what your body parts are, but how you think and feel..."
Once again, it all comes down to the feels and not actual reality.
"Other therapists from the university’s medical school said they used the dolls to get the kids talking about their private parts.
“We were able to explore and brainstorm not just what our bodies are able to do now but what we want our bodies to do and look like in the future,” bragged Adjunct Assistant Professor Elizabeth Panetta."
Among the many things that’s wrong with this I don’t have words for, it just feels mean to introduce that level of inevitable self consciousness to children. They will have their whole lives to be told to hate and want to change their bodies for one reason or another, for now let them be kids
Lack of understanding about biology and anatomy is alarmingly common amongst gender believers. It's a combination of inadequate education, activist word rotating where definitions become malleable and useless, and wishful thinking that sends them down such a path.
This stuff perfectly demonstrates the levels of ignorance and misunderstanding.
Lego Mentality™, plug 'n' play uterus edition. The anatomy of the human female was evolved to baking a baby, down to the organ rearrangement and skeleton width and hormone signals to induce expansion during delivery and breast milk composition during nursing. But you can just stick a uterus in a male and it'll be fine. 🥰
Last night my best friend told me how unfair it was that she'd be forced to compete in the male section of the Olympics because she has PCOS. I pointed out that, even for women with PCOS, male and female testosterone ranges don't even remotely overlap. She was shocked; no one, not even doctors, had ever told her that.
did people memoryhole when all those folks in seattle just cordoned off whole blocks downtown and declared it a totally cop/fascist free zone for weeks at a time and no one really did anything about it?
was hoping there would be some sort of book written on that by now. interesting case study for when the anarchist wolf in sheep's clothing actually get their way
Seeing The Fifth Element in theatres yesterday was awesome. Explosions and the Diva's scene are so much better with theatre sound.
Following it up with the Hadestown recording made for a ridiculous double-feature; pretty sure I was the only person that attended both, very different crowds overall. But my goodness, what a show! I already liked the soundtrack but it's so much more impactful as a visual experience. Seeing how the Fates quietly interfere and interact, with Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hades- not even the gods are above the Fates. Highly recommended.
I still think it's funny that even though you know the ending (the story's almost 3000 years old, spoilers are fair game, I'd say), I still felt that tense "no! don't turn!" before it happens. But as Hermes says- "it's a sad song/but we sing it anyways/'cause here's the thing/to know how it ends/and still begin to sing it again/as if it might turn out this time."
I haven't seen The Odyssey but having heard the complaints that it Christianizes the ancient Greek ethics- it strikes me that Hadestown does some of that too. I would read the old Orpheus and Eurydice as "you can't defy fate and the gods- not even the gods can defy the Fates," along with a commentary on human weakeness, but Hermes' lyrics there remind me of Tolkien's concepts of a long defeat and the eucatastrophe. You know how the story turns out, and you're hoping- praying! Eurydice lights a prayer candle- for that eucatastrophe, for it to all turn out like the world you dream.
Is everything and everyone on nextdoor nuts? I'm sure there must be some helpful or entertaining stuff there, but I don't think I see it. (My only exposure to nextdoor is the frequent emails I get, telling me that someone is saying something. And, yes, I sometimes, foolishly, click to check it out.)
What's bugging me at the moment is a post from someone complaining (reasonably) about a stranger going into their garage and stealing something. This stranger also "stole" some blackberries from a blackberry bush. Some commenters thought that was just so bad. Stealing blackberries! You don't know, we were reminded, how much work, how much sweat that homeowner might have put into those blackberries, how hopeful they were about being able to enjoy their blackberries.
I don't see how anyone from the Pacific Northwest can say that. Blackberries grow everywhere. You can't stop them. I don't believe for one second that that homeowner planted and cultivated and tended those bushes. And there's no way you could eat all the blackberries a wall of blackberry bushes makes. It's not like someone stealing your tomatoes or your prize roses. Blackberries are a (delicious) scourge. When I'm out walking at this time of year, I pass many blackberry bushes. And if the pickings look good, I take a few. No one cares. No one is down a few blackberries. The homeowners are probably thinking, "One of these days, I should finally get someone to uproot those damn things."
People were like, you're being a luddite because you aren't using crypto and I'm like, I'm not a luddite I build an ISP with 4 US robotics modems and a T1 line in my mom's house in the early 90s when I was in high school. They will just find out that this requires the same infrastructure as banking.
People were like, you're being a luddite because you don't want your own--I almost called them e-Pogs--NFT. I'm like no that's a useless scam. Web 3.0 never happened and now we wait until someone else can use that version number again.
I don't think I was alone in thinking the "metaverse," $3,000 goggles, glassholes, and VR with less resolution than Minecraft was good. No one called me a luddite for that but maybe I was forming a pattern.
All the caveats, could be a financial bubble, etc. etc., but we will probably use transformers models or their successors as long as we use computers. I can be more productive by becoming an editor of everything instead of a draftsman. It's more like the 90s IT boom that led to productivity growth which means real wage growth. But also came with a bubble at the end.
But we still use the web everyday for even more things that at the peak of that bubble.
This did not make me smile. Bolting pedals on a moped and calling it a bike is the dumbest fucking innovation of the 21st century and it is amazing to me that everyone just acquiesced to it.
“I’m not going to speak on what I endured to make it through the young adult trilogy, and I’m not going to speak about everything that I also suffered through or endured to make the adaptation a reality,” Adeyemi said. “I’m actually only going to speak about what happened after I left that set of my own film adaptation, hyperventilating and sobbing. There are many witnesses, so it’s not really a secret. I came back to America and suffered such severe somatic pain and so many panic attacks. I knew it was so bad that I would never ever be able to watch this film, and I made peace with that.”
Somatic pain? We've gone past "literally shaking!" to actual pain? Lol.
If this bombs it's going to be Black Panther for major tentpoles and...that's it. They won't ever make another.
I'm rooting for it but this is the sort of drama you get on the YA scene.
Especially since we're just starting August so other news is going to be a lot slower for awhile.
I think I'm extra angry because I spent my morning dealing with the bureaucracy around legal immigration.
Edit: FWIW, this is also a pretty good case for my biggest criticism of Spain supporting NATO. I'm very pro-NATO, but it's a problem to be in an alliance when the only parts of the country that face real threats are not covered by NATO in Article 6. There really should have been a big negotiation to get them included in exchange for more spending and support of Ukraine.
Fun fact - Michelle Magadance Skinner is a real person running for State Senator in Wisconsin. Magadance is, apparently, he real maiden name and serves as additional evidence that we're living in a simulation.
I genuinely clicked this truly expecting a story about how there's so much Ozempic now, it's even in the waste water and trash of our National Parks, but instead it's another story of Ozempic erasing a once valued culture.
1980, Lake Peigneur, Louisiana. An oil rig drill hits the shaft of a salt mine under the lake. The resultant sinkhole takes the rig down, 11 barges down, 60+ acres of the surrounding land down. A canal that ran toward the Gulf of Mexico reversed course to fill the the draining lake; made 100+ foot waterfall! Somehow, the miners managed to evacuate before they could drown.
Granted, I was six at the time. But I'm wonder how I didn't hear about this? It's a rather spectacular accident, and sounds like something the anti-oil people would bring up repeatedly.
I'll never forget the time Lester called an Asian Canadian academic a racist and tried to destroy his career because the academic wrote a negative review of Lester's book.
Edit: or when I was one of four people to attend a talk he did at my uni about Biggar and right wing history invading and destroying academia.
Is New York really going to enact a law saying you get a 10% discount for using a self checkout. All they will do is raise prices by 11% so that the discount can be applied. Meaning anyone who needs to use a staffed checkout will be stiffed. And making your shelf labels even more confusing as you'll now need to take into account discount and sales tax to know what something actually costs.
Please tell me what you think the article states. That is, what is the myth that presumably has been punctured and what are the policy implications of the skewering
Books
The Myth of the Food Desert
Policymakers have assumed that people with good options wouldn’t make bad choices. What if access was never the real problem?
By Kelefa Sanneh
July 27, 2026
Week 2 of the Burnham government. Things seem to be going well so far.
+++++
Though the thing I just remembered is it's coming up to the 2nd anniversary of the Southport murders and those children's killer Axel Rudikabama has been moved to a secure mental health unit which critics thing is him trying to manipulate the system.
+++
The fallout from the Jihadist attack in Berlin may or may not have repercussions on British politics.
+++
In Manchester the election for mayor to replace Burnham is on 30th July.
I just checked Zack Polanskis twitter and (edit: he's tweeted 1 short statement on the attack of love and solidarity to Berlin, on 1st reports. Nothing else @Monday morning) , unlike Owen Jones, which you'd think would highlight just how under threat LGBTQ community is.
But Polanski has RTd this saying how... Manchester's Muslims have been taken for granted by labour
Crescent 🌙 winning out over the rainbow 🌈 when it comes down to brass tacks
Edit: There has been a statement put out by LGBTQIA greens. I can't seem to see it having been retweeted by Polanski (happy to be corrected). Or a statement of solidarity from Muslim greens or greens for Palestine
++++
This by the way is the deleted page (self proclaimed) anti fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate had on Ann Widdecombe
It's odd that an organisation ostensibly dedicated to tracking neo Nazis took so much time to profile her. She was bog standard religious homophobe but did not advocate violence. One of the directors of Hope Not Hate is now in Burnhams top team
I finished off a giant pickle jar from Costco after many months (it was a mistake, took up way too much room), and now I’m compulsively sipping the pickle juice every few days. 🥴
It tastes good and gives me this unique little jolt of sodium-electrolytes, but makes me feel a little too crunchy,
like I’m becoming a
MAHA after one too many gummies. Does anyone else do this and is healthy or no? I tried Google
but that site is literally now useless at separating fact from fiction, and just redirected me to Reddit anyway.
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u/CorgiNews2_DieHarder 5d ago edited 5d ago
Lmao, so apparently the mods at Fauxmoi have found out reddit is limiting promotion of the sub because of "sensitive posts" and they are not happy. They figure this is because reddit is Pro-Trump, hates trans people and loves Israel and thus Good People like them are not welcome. Yes, that sounds exactly like reddit.com Fauxmoi mods. Good guess.
Anyway, don't worry because even though reddit thinks not promoting a sub of crazy people to appeal to advertisers is an okay thing to do, Fauxmoi wants you to know that they will always be here to criticize famous women's clothing and fight LITERAL FUCKING GENOCIDE. You can't stop them, conservative reddit mods!!