Historian of the former Yugoslavia and ethnic partitionism. X-Men opinion-haver. Did a PhD on diplomacy in the Bosnian War. Host of The History of Yugoslavia podcast.
4,830 followers 496 following 17,918 posts
view profile on Bluesky
I understand you were looking for a interminable and pointless back and forth in which you disingenuously try to convince me (and/or yourself) that "Ugh, trannies, gross!" is actually a Really Lefty Progressive View, Honest! But I've been through enough of those already.
It is sad, for all the reasons listed here and more, but I do not believe it will be the end of Rayner's political career – not by any stretch of the imagination
"Please play my troll game"
It's a common trend across cases of ethnically polarised conflict and/or segregation. Racists like to present the spectre of ethnic heterogeneity as causing tension and violence, but typically it's the opposite - rabid racists and atrocity perpetrators come more often from more homogeneous areas.
So you know what answer you were expecting, or are you pretending to be genuinely oblivious?
The search function exists - not hard to find out you've tried this countless times before and people have given you good faith answers which you've rejected.
Except you do know, you're just sealioning.
Clearly, she's planning to play football for Switzerland
Hopefully
And there we go. Last nail in the coffin of any hope for this Labour government.
You aren't sincerely interested in having the question answered, so it's the only appropriate response.
"I ran for elected government office with no idea what to do, this is the fault of the office for not being designed for a moron like me."
Same way many people have this belief that you apply for asylum in a particular country and *then* travel there rather than vice versa.
As with immigration/asylum procedures, I think transition procedures are generally not widely understood and so people can often have mistaken impressions about where particular steps fall in the process.
It's always been about giving old-style reactionary-conservative prejudices a pseudo-feminist wash.
This is spot on. The general public don't get to see the huge losses because it's done piecemeal university by university. Add the numbers up across the UK and it's horrifying. Thousands of jobs. Millions spent on useless consultants.
Politicians: It's really important that the police should focus on real crimes instead of irrelevant stuff like tweets. Also politicians:
I would be happy if I never heard the name Graham Linehan again, but I do feel the need to comment, because the nature of a lot of the abuse trans people receive is straight up sexual harassment, but is not recognized as such because the victim is trans. What Glinner is doing is sexual harassment.
Similarly, your general right to freely convert to and practice whatever religion you like whenever you like does not preclude your boss from being sceptical of your sincerity if you seemed to just convert that morning to get the day off b/c it's a particular religion's holiday that day.
The obvious parallel is name changes. People have pretty broad discretion to change their name to whatever they like, but that doesn't mean you can just claim any random name at a given moment and have it be treated as valid, you can be expected to show it's a genuine name you sincerely go by.
I think part of the sincere confusion over "self-id" among relatively low-attention observers (as opposed to bad faith transphobes) was that it was something you could do on a sudden whim purely by verbal proclamation, rather than still a pretty bureaucratic, documented and time-consuming process.
A man so disliked by Saints fans that there were crowd chants demanding his resignation and coins being thrown at him *in a boardroom meeting*.
Lowe's experience in football being his period as chairman of Southampton, during which he guided them from being a stable and established Premier League team to bankruptcy and League One.
If she doesn't get something like that, then this stays pretty meaningless. If she does, then every other Tory defector will expect the same, and eventually Reform will have a sizable bloc of Tory defectors who at some point are inevitably going to come into conflict with Farage.
It may be symbolically significant, but what does it actually *mean* in practical terms for someone like Dorries, who holds no elected position, to join Reform? Is she going to get her pick at what seat/office to run for? A quasi-frontbench spokesperson position? Anything?
I think this is an issue which intersects with Farage's eternal dilemma: namely, that he needs other people of note in his party to actually achieve anything, but also he doesn't like sharing his party with anyone else of note. In a very real way, "defections" like Dorries' are purely declarative.
Other important questions: 1) Who would you cast as Banshee and/or Siryn in the new X-Men films? 2) Who would you prioritise preventing from ever returning to Ireland: Michael Brendan Dougherty, Graham Linehan or Conor McGregor? 3) Jedward?
I like my coffee like I like my men: I don't like coffee
Me and my Bsky bubble
obligatory "literally [idiomatic metaphor]"
Especially when there's going to be so many more guns around...
Yes, people are totally really happy in Russia. On a completely unrelated note:
The bravery on display by the LITERAL TEENAGER facing down both Glinner and a crowd of the most disgusting people alive while they laugh in her face from the public gallery is astonishing. I can't fucking *imagine* what she must have gone through over the past year.
Spurs fans discussing bad transfer policy be like:
Spoken to my trans nephew this morning on the back of this WhatsApp message. He was challenged by an elderly man about his choice of toilet. The pub was in a relatively wealthy suburb of Leeds. Despicable behaviour!
Amused not only by this pointless, nothing-nonsense clickbait, but also by the little 'please be nice to each other in the comments' note at the bottom. It's almost as if the Telegraph understands that, in reality, you don't always want to unexpectedly confront uncomfortable ideas.. archive.ph/huVYk
"Give me a D! Give me an E! Give me an E! What do you get? Into Hallam!" is the one I always remember.
I would assume very similar to the ones we at Uni of Sheff sang at the Hallamers? 😅
Nottingham soon to see riots between its two major ethnic groups - Uni of Nottinghamers and Nottingham Trenters
Yardley and Erdington pointing their nuclear arsenals at each other.
At the core of transmisogyny is, inevitably, misogyny itself. The viciousness with which some people trash trans women for how they look, or their supposed artificiality, or perceived errors in their behaviour, comes from a fundamental loathing of any women who doesn’t conform to their expectations.
Prosecuted for what? Being in the "wrong" toilets isn't a crime.
Despite how news outlet may try to portray it, Graham Linehan is in court today for *assaulting a child* The fact they are trans, an activist or anything else is totally irrelevant.
This is art
When I posted that I was the "lesbian staffer" that quit Duffield's office, Linehan went for me and I had days and days of abuse (Duffield did nothing natch). It was probably the most online homophobia I've ever experienced, and he called me a disgrace to gay rights.
This kind of contradiction has been an issue with Labour triangulation for a while - simultaneously raising the threat of someone else winning while focusing all their energy on people for whom that isn't particularly threatening.
Graham Linehan once took issue with a sketch I did and tweeted about me referring to me not by name but only as to who my boyfriend was and called me an NPC ( non player character.) It was misogynistic and his “standing up for women” schtick is baloney.
This is an argument for falling population, falling GDP, and an employment crisis.
Worth reading The Times' editorial on Powell from 1968. Contrast it with last week, when it pointed out that Farage's deportation proposals would "undoubtedly find favour" and other parties "better come up with something radical." A truly contemptible descent for a once-great newspaper.
(and he wasn't actually a plumber himself, he was a guy who had *bought* a plumbing company)
Just came across a reference to "Joe the Plumber", and remembering the absurdity that he was painted as some normal, average working class guy when his claimed income put him in the top ~3% of US earners, and he still wasn't at the level that Obama was proposing tax rises for despite claiming to be.
But that guy isn't white, he's clearly blue
But that guy isn't even white, he's blue
This is fair criticism, my apologies for my not great wording in my initial post, did not mean to erase earlier generations of activism, but can see how it might come across that way, I've added this follow-up:
This is totally fair to say, and I've added in this is a follow-up post. Apologies, did not intend to erase earlier generations of activism, more just to illustrate that the transphobes' mythologised all-powerful trans movement didn't exist!
And I do think there's something clearly distinct about the mass movement that has developed since the late 2010s. I might not be phrasing myself well here, but I hope my intent comes across OK?
Apologies, I did phrase this post a bit carelessly - yes, as others have noted, there were of course activists campaigning for trans rights prior to the 2010s! But it was on a smaller and less visible scale, and bears little resemblance to anti-trans obsessives' myths.
We can't have a justice system based on public whim (even setting aside moral Qs, it's just impractical - people don't want to have to weigh in on every dude who didn't clean up his dog's shit), so we need rules of some sort, and any rules are going to be gamed or differently applied in some way!
There's an illustrative bait-and-switch here. Baker is painted as having "got off" simply because she avoided conviction, even though she was arrested, imprisoned and prosecuted, whereas Linehan can only be considered to have "got off" if there was no police engagement at all.
CAN YOU IMAGINE CALLING FOR SOMEONE TO BE ARRESTED FOR A TWEET?!?!
Few really object to this principle of discretion - most people do indeed think the law should come down harder in some cases than others, even where the two are facially the same offence. Many just object to this discretion following priorities other than their own.
Some cases are of particular public significance or interest, and often that's where that discretion comes in - as the government acknowledged at the time, they were going to come down harder on racist rioters to deter repeats.
The thing about the "two-tier justice" is that, like "free speech absolutist", few if any espousing it really sincerely believe it. Prosecutors and judges always have a certain degree of discretion, and sometimes that means they "unfairly" come down harder in some cases that others.
Over the course of the 2010s, trans people went from something that was almost hypothetical to many people - something they knew existed somewhere but never really came across or had to think about - to something they might actually see or meet in day-to-day life, and that made some people angry.
Anti-trans obsessives' supposed evidence of "trans rights activists going too far" before that is inevitably stuff like obscure minor amendments to Stonewall policy papers that like 5 people read. Because, of course, it's all retroactively invented - what they really mean is greater trans visibility
The thing about "trans activism" is that it basically didn't exist in the UK as a distinct thing until the last several years, and it emerged largely *in response* to the wave of public transphobia. London Trans Pride first happened in *2019*, in response to anti-trans obstructors at 2018 Pride.
No-one has a DNA connection to the land because human beings don't have DNA connection to earth and soil.
"I totally did it for these women who think I'm a nutter and want nothing to do with me for it."
Alternatively, Karadžić's March 1992 proposed map of BiH:
"How David Duke's race activism led to career armageddon"
Ah, didn't realise Dhillon was a she, my mistake
Ah thanks, I knew Leonidas would've spoken Doric rather than classical Greek, but not sure what the Doric equivalent would've been, thanks!
Xi Jinping listened to @mikeduncan.bsky.social's Martian Revolution series and took Vernon Byrd as a role model.
Though @drdiongeorgiou.bsky.social or any other Greek-speaker feel free to correct me on that!
I'd guess it was probably just translated for each in turn. If it was some kind of diplomatic lingua franca, then it was probably Aramaic.
Also, kind of curious as to how he said it. Particularly funny if he pronounced λαβέ/"labe" as rhyming with "babe", but "lah-bay" would also be wrong - Plutarch (the source for the quote), and I believe all modern Greek speakers, would've said something more like "lah-vay".
*earliest
Also, we know for a fact that Leonidas didn't say "Molon labe". It's already doubtful because the earlier source for it comes centuries after it supposedly happened, but mostly we know it didn't happen because it's Roman-era standard Greek rather than the archaic Tsakonian Leonidas would've used.
I am once again begging the Sparta fanboys to read up on how Thermopylae ended for Leonidas
Not really addressing the point here. If you completely reject the legitimacy of being trans in any way (*why* is irrelevant here) to the point that you think it justifies physical assault, then what is the point of adding such an obviously false "I believe in trans rights" line?
Something I got depressingly wrong about Starmer's Labour was my assumption that the empty platitudes just represented indifference and that they'd just ignore trans people altogether and focus on boring shit. But no, they've been ready to wage a full-on "culture war", just with a smiley drawn on.
Still spouting them, for the most part!
Who is this for? Because honestly, no, if you think it's fine to physically assault someone because you think they're trans and in the "wrong" toilet, you don't "believe in trans rights" in any remotely meaningful way. Are you really trying to convince others, or just yourself?
Tbf, at this point probably a comfortable majority of people between Cork and Calcutta have at least some descent from ancient (proto-)Hebrews.
I can't photoshop to save my life, but this'll do.
inb4 "Wes Streeting doesn't have any balls"
Not to mention it's a wild claim where those arrested on for terrorism-related offences get farcically limited rights compared to how Linehan was treated. He was basically arrested, interviewed, and then let go: terrorism suspects can be and often are detained without charge for a whole fortnight.
In general, I think any approach to I-P that comes from the perspective of trying to deliver some kind of "historical justice" is a stupid and dangerous idea. I want rights and justice for the flesh-and-blood people living there now, not their long dead ancestors.
Personally this is where I think the ancient history has ultimately become moot - it's Israeli Jews' homeland *now*, regardless of whether or not they were right to consider it such in 1948/1917/whenever. Whether it should have or not. distinct Israeli Jewish Modern Hebrew community *has* developed.
So Muslims become "Islamists", Jews "Zionists", Palestinians "Hamas", Black people "DEI", women "radical feminists", etc I'm not equating the real versions of these labels here, because that isn't the point of the labelling, which is to redesignate demographics as mere chosen political affiliations
It does however fit into a larger pattern in which a bigot who feels guilt/shame at hating a whole group carves out a tiny niche for their imagined members of the group who actively agree w/ and repeat everything they say & do, while "politicising" everyone else.
"Tommy Robinson, a vocal activist who is highly critical of the immigrant rights movement" "David Duke, a vocal activist who is highly critical of the Jewish rights movement"
Free-for-all on incitement to violence against marginalised groups promised by leading thugs of the British state.