nal sanctions.”
Women’s rights advocate Margeurite Stern, who has also been harshly criticized by SOS Homophobie, commented on the situation on X. “Gynecologists are trained to treat WOMEN’s genitals. Not inverted penises or cavities created using pieces of colon or peritoneum,” Stern said. “We live in a world of lunatics.”
Yes, that would seem to be the case.
s in the history of the continent. Despite the horrors of the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapsed without a fight. Former Soviet states lined up to join the West, while Russia has only managed to maintain its sphere of influence with force and coercion.
Although the war in Ukraine is the largest conflict on European soil since World War II, Western powers have helped Kyiv defend itself from Russian aggression without deploying any NATO forces on the battlefield. China is a rapidly rising power, but the militaries of the United States and its European and East Asian allies are far more powerful. There is anxious talk of a “new authoritarian axis” comprising China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But NATO defence spending is three times higher than this axis, and it has surged since the invasion of Ukraine. NATO has also continued to expand with the recent accession of Finland and Sweden.
Democracies have created historically unprecedented economic prosperity. Marxists assumed that conditions for a growing majority of workers would inevitably get worse while a shrinking capitalist class would get richer and richer—a status quo that would eventually spark revolution. Instead, there has been vast wealth creation at all levels of society in democratic countries.
It may seem like the main threats to the open society today are authoritarian foes like Russia and China, but a much greater threat is the crisis of confidence in democratic institutions. The leaders in Moscow and Beijing may purport to offer an alternative to liberal democracy, but we aren’t in the middle of an ideological Cold War. Vladimir Putin has imperial ambitions, but he’s well aware that his decaying petro-autocracy isn’t some bold new political idea that could take root elsewhere. Xi Jinping is a nationalist who believes China deserves to be a great power, but China’s unique blend of totalitarianism and economic growth can’t be replicated. Third-rate dictatorships like Venezuela or North Korea don’t even pretend to care about anything beyond personal power and corruption, while the ideology of antique theocracies like Iran will never win a mass following around the world. […]
Although The Open Society and Its Enemies is a powerful indictment of historicism, we no longer live in an era dominated by historicist fantasies like Marxism. We live in an era of political nihilism—an era in which the gravest threat to democracy isn’t a rival ideology like communism; it’s the collapsing faith in democracy among citizens of open societies. As Fukuyama explained, the success of liberal democracy isn’t just material—it’s in the “realm of consciousness or ideas.” This is the battlefield for the open society today, and it’s why Popper’s most important contribution goes beyond his attack on historicism.
I seem to recall that Popper used to be regarded as on the Right: as someone not fully in step with the great progressive improvement projects of recent times. I suppose that was back in the day when being on the Left meant having at least some warm feelings towards Marxism, or at least Trotskyism as a kind of fantasy Marxism without all the nasty Soviet/gulag/Maoist/Pol Pot bits. How it could have been if it wasn't for that nasty Stalin. But surely we're past that now.
Anyway, yes – worth a read.
written (or rather, last amended) just over a month ago. This what the US medical establishment believes, now – though, yes, before Trump. It's Orwellian stuff: the medical mutilation of troubled teens as "gender affirming care". As a medical scandal this surely dwarfs anything before. How on earth did it get to this?
As for the Cass Review:
This year, an extensive but controversial research review in the UK called the use of puberty-delaying medications into question, saying that the rationale for early puberty suppression was “unclear” and that any benefit for mental health was supported by “weak evidence.” The review — known as the Cass Review for Dr. Hilary Cass, the pediatrician who conducted it — has prompted providers in the UK to scale back their use of the treatment. However, its methodology have come under sharp criticism from some scholars and practitioners.
Hmm.
ttempt to erase us. This year, we were told, Holocaust Memorial Day commemorated not just the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz but also the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Bosnia. To which I say: Why can’t the Bosnians – and the Rwandans, Cambodians and Darfurians, for that matter – have their own ceremony?
If people want to observe a “Genocide Memorial Day”, that’s fine. But this year proved that relativisation has always been the prelude to erasure. The smarmy ecumenicals have been picking Jewish pockets of our anguish, then telling us that we never owned it in the first place. […]
In 2025, mourning the Holocaust has become a vehicle for undoing the Jews. When the Irish president took to the stage in Dublin and proceeded to defile our pain by dragging it through the rubble of Gaza, he was echoing an ancient precedent. Norwich, 1144: The Jews killed little William. Berlin, 1934: Die Juden sind unser Unglück. Dublin, 2025: It’s sad about the Holocaust and everything but what really matters is Gaza. Especially the children.
Several Jews turned their backs on Higgins and were manhandled and ejected. We were left with certain questions. As the security guards dragged a Jewish woman – a historian of the Shoah at that – from a ceremony to mourn her dead, did they not sense a certain irony? What to make of the fact that two Holocaust survivors, Tomi Reichental and Suzi Diamond, had begged Higgins not to bring Gaza into his speech and were ignored? And where is all this leading?
I’m dreading next year. Like I said: is there a point to Holocaust Memorial Day any longer? The King’s visit to Auschwitz was immensely meaningful, of course, as were the many local ceremonies. But perhaps we should focus our energies instead on Yom Hashoah, the Israeli springtime commemoration, which remains – shock horror – solely about the Jewish genocide. Perhaps it is time to defend our right to mourn.
It's Holocaust Memorial Day. Not Genocide Memorial Day. The clue's in the name.
p>The schools in Gaza which brainwash children into believing war is their destiny, and martyrdom while killing Jews their sole aim in life, are run by UNRWA – an organisation dedicated to the belief that Palestinians will always be refugees until Israel is destroyed. And we fund it.
Just shocking.
Why on earth is the UK Government giving more money to @UNRWA?
You can't talk about tackling extremism in the UK and then literally send cash to groups that helped carry out the Oct 7 atrocities with Hamas.
Are you completely mad? pic.twitter.com/H7o9LyVt4j
— David Collier (@mishtal) January 29, 2025
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
As has been said here often enough, UNRWA are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
0px”>Trans became an umbrella with its own language, and the righteous and the modern took it to be the one true faith. Stonewall spread this ideology. So did the BBC, The Guardian, most liberal media, the Labour Party, the Fawcett Society, the NHS, the “humanists”, the entire art world, and academia – in other words, the cultural elite….
Few will admit they were wrong or misled. They will simply rewrite history. Just like those who sought to relieve the agonies of deeply depressed patients through an ice pick in their brains, they will say their experimental treatments did help some, that they were at the forefront of a new kind of medicine.
Those who cheered this on will keep quiet while they scrabble in the dirt for the next civil rights battle. They picked the wrong one. It would take actual bravery to say this in public. Their silence is deafening.
William Henry Jackson: the Mississippi River ca. 1902. "St. Paul from High Bridge."
[Photo: Shorpy/William Henry Jackson, Detroit Photographic Company]
nd that the centre had failed to properly protect women-only spaces and had “caused damage to some survivors”.
Ms Ling called on RCS to devise and publish a “shared definition of woman/female” to be adopted across its network.
The charity, which receives more than £3 million in annual funding from the SNP government, had previously accepted Ms Ling’s recommendations in full. Sandy Brindley, its chief executive, claimed last September that work on a definition had been going on for nearly a year.
It's so complicated. The greatest philosophical minds are stumbling over this one. Well, only the greatest philosophical minds are stumbling over this one. Everyone else knows that a woman is an adult human female.
Tess White, the Scottish Tory shadow equalities minister, claimed the “shocking U-turn” showed RCS “haven’t learned any lessons” from a series of scandals.
“Once again women have been badly let down by an organisation that is supposed to support them, but which is failing to show any common sense,” she said.
“It is unacceptable that RCS still cannot give women reassurance that they will be able to access single-sex spaces at these centres.
“Ultimately, the SNP’s reckless self-ID policies are to blame for this betrayal of women and girls.”
Meanwhile, life goes on:
The Sunday Post reported at the weekend that in an internal consultation document about new rules, RCS stated that a woman can be “anyone who self-identifies as a woman”.
t this man was pretending to be a woman, playing in a woman's football team, so the poor girl was naturally accused of transphobia. Like the emperor's new clothes, only she was prepared to speak up about what was real, while everyone else went along with the charade.
And here we go again. From the Telegraph:
A second teenage footballer has been handed a six-match ban for asking whether adult transgender opponents she was playing were men.
An 18-year-old, whom Telegraph Sport has been told has both ADHD and learning difficulties, was sanctioned by a National Serious Case Panel in a case with parallels to that for which a 17-year-old girl with suspected autism was handed a similar suspension.
The second teen was charged by her county FA over comments she made to a referee during a match in September, the same month she turned 18. It was alleged she said: “Ref, have you checked if all of their players are eligible to play? Look at their ’keeper and for example their number 10 is obviously a man,” or something similar.
She was banned for six matches, two of which were suspended, after accepting the charge brought under national Football Association rules that allow those born male to play in women’s matches. The teen was also forced to undergo an “online education course”, while her club were handed seven disciplinary points.
An investigation into her comments required her to provide a written statement, which Telegraph Sport has been told she needed assistance in composing. In it she said she had sought guidance from the referee due to her trans opponents’ “extremely aggressive” style of play. She also said she had not taken her ADHD medication on the day in question because “another medical condition” had prevented her from doing so.
The disciplinary proceedings were triggered by a complaint made by the opposition club, which included the claim that she had said to their non-trans players: “This is a man.” She has admitted trying to ask those players if their team-mates were biologically male after failing to get clarity from the ref, who, she wrote in her statement, had threatened to send her off if she continued to quiz him on the matter.
Speaking to Telegraph Sport on condition of anonymity, the teenager said of her ban: “It kind of made me hate football.”
Yes, it kind of made me hate football too. Well, the FA at least.
She also said she feared she had been gagged from asking questions or raising concerns about playing against those born male. “If I say anything else, I get another six-game ban,” she said. “So I can’t even stand up for myself at this point.”