Whenever I see footage of americans reacting to sudden gunfire I think "wow I don't think I'd be so quick to realise what was happening and hide" and then I remember they are literally repeatedly trained for it as little children in school.

“Remember, they have genuine needs and concerns; and we shouldn’t call them Nazis…”

Y'all if you think that the reason we don't have universal healthcare is that it costs too much, I don't know what to say to you. We would get better healthcare for less money with universal healthcare. The cost is not the issue. There are many reasons we don't have universal healthcare.

I think #3 might be that we insist on seeing affluence as a reflection of virtue. The idea that everyone has the same health care repels many people bc they believe poor people “deserve” crappier things, & rich people better ones (& to the extent affluence tracks race, it affirms their racism)

My parish, folks. For one more day, anyway.

I will never forget the GCs and Yoons teaming up on Nicola, and going after her for not having children. It was really dark and malicious, with inferences of queerness, not being a 'real woman' etc Even when Sturgeon shared her heartbreaking infertility battle, they never stopped. Rank misogyny.

this is so cool, and there are no plans to ever bring it to the US market

Top Tip for your Summer Salads now the weather is glorious. Save money on fancy, expensive, croutons by emptying your toaster over the prepared salad before serving.

I think it's a pretty good demonstration of the fact that women being paid less isn't because we are worse at demanding better pay.

Only 90s British kids will get this

Specifically the alt text is "there's Klingons in the starboard bow,starboard bow,"there's Klingons in the starboard bow,starboard bow, Jim"

Okay new Pentecost challenge. Translate the text into a bunch of languages, then transcribe into the IPA, hand the transcription to a bunch of people who can read the IPA but don’t know the language, and see if they can guess what language they were given by the end of the passage. ⚓️

Who should lead the Labour Party? Honest to god… where is the decency, the integrity, the willingness to stick up for people, to call out the racists and the haters… loudly and unequivocally? Where did that go? What did these people go into politics for? Cos we couldn’t give a damn about their egos.

Anyway, tomorrow's Pentecost sermon is about how embracing difference and diversity is inherent to how the Holy Spirit works, and who we are as Spirit-filled people. And I *think* it's on the right side of the line.

One of the most underrated homiletic skills imho: discerning whether the direction your sermon is taking is prompted by anger/frustration/reaction to recent events/whatever, or by the Holy Spirit. It can be a fine line.

Toddler update: my husband let her taste his ice cream and she took the ice cream and ran. My husband has tried to bribe her to give it back my replacing it with a biscuit. Anyway now the toddler has an ice cream and a biscuit

By treating Welsh, Scottish and English nationalism as variations of the same political problem, Streeting created a false equivalence between movements shaped by entirely different political traditions and grievances ✍️Brenig Davies wp.me/p8Mk4U-1lJR

I mean, robot/AI stories are almost all stories about slaves, and "robot uprising" stories are about slave rebellions. Do we honestly think slaves rebel just because there are stories about slave rebellions? Or is there perhaps some OTHER reason for such uprisings?

Also trans women often experience sex discrimination because they are perceived as women, this is explicitly acknowledged in the guidance. Anyone who imagines this doesn't extend to their pay is kidding themselves.

Another of those wonderful Brexit freedoms is the scrapping of “health and safety laws which removed powers to ban products thought to pose a health hazard”, the so called “red tape”… Enjoy the Asbestos in your Kids toys Brexiteers, its what you voted for! #Brexit #Reform #Farage #Conservatives

Doesn't it elsewhere state that having a religious objection to gay people doesn't mean you can refuse them service? Surely having a gender critical belief that trans women are not women should equally not allow you to refuse them access to things? (It doesn't work that way apparently).

weird that my job is writing book reports every week for the longest running book club in history ⚓

After a few seconds, I felt a tug at my trouser leg. I looked round, and the boy was holding up a bag of small rubber ducks for my attention and saying to me. "Quack, quack!" I came back with the only acceptable response, which was, naturally, my own "Quack, quack!"

When my daughter was about that age, we went to the park with her grandparents. I held one of her hands and my dad held the other. When she wanted to run off and play, she carefully put my hand in my dad's, so that we wouldn't get lost without her there to supervise us.

Oh and obviously we need lots more free, accessible public loos in the first place. That's the bloody toilet discourse we SHOULD be having.

Lots more loos and lots more benches. ACTUAL benches, not hostile perches with barriers on them.

Hive mind: if I have something ink-jet printed on a piece of normal paper, is there a solvent (acetone? White spirit? IPA?) that will allow me to sponge through the back of that print and transfer it to another surface (Lino)? Transfer does not have to be permanent.

When people say this nonsense, perhaps point out that decades ago people said women going out to work would lead to mass male unemployment and/or lower wages for men, but it NEVER DID. Instead the total no of jobs increased. I believe that's when rhe lump of labour fallacy was identified.

The fact that the finalists leaving us this summer will be applying for jobs which pay about the same wage as I was looking at when I was looking around for jobs before getting my PhD place about a quarter of a century ago is eternally boggling to me.

This. Also: if you’re cis? Prefer not to say.

Just had a horrible prophetic vision of some business arguing that they don't have a gender pay gap bc their precarious trans women employees skew the data

*Taps the sign* (My 2025-2026 harvest: 607kg from the allotment and garden, another 117kg foraged produce. I expect 2026-27 to be substantially less productive, I'm late on everything this spring.)

Me: Love, please don't put too much pressure on your knee. It's important for healing to treat it small-c conservatively Mercy: what if I want to treat it large-C conservatively? Me: Okay, tell it to stop hurting, pick itself up by its bootstraps, and get back to work.

« rising tide of… neurodiversity » Now I’m picturing a huge wave of autistic people, a myriad of hair colours, about to crash on a city, neurotypical people screaming and running left and right. « You shouldn’t have had us vaccinated, motherf***ers! »

And I'm like, how am I supposed to get experience if no-one will hire me? How am I supposed to get a job when having the qualifications, skills, and enthusiasm that are a perfect fit for the job isn't enough to actually get hired?

The problem is with the job market, which is to say that it's with employers. Since graduating uni last summer, I've applied to several jobs that I'd be *perfect* for, and have been rejected from all of them.

Isn’t that wild, how this country has very few problems that are not “people be on their damn phones” and almost none that can’t be resolved by scything benefits. How lucky for all of us, and very lucky there are always credulous journos willing to stampede that shit into print, no questions asked.

Can it really be true that: a) the Women's Institute has had trans members since the 1970s, b) the UK passed a law in 2010 requiring them to be expelled, c) nobody noticed this until 2026? it seems that we may have to consider the appalling vista that some lawyers are very bad at their job

It’s worse. Following the conceit of the court Parliament not only passed it but intended to do so. Parliament then immediately forgot this and issued guidance saying trans members should be included by default. Putting it all together the fantastical Supreme Court story we’re asked to believe is …

a) Women’s Institute has had trans members since the 70s b) Parliament passed a law in 2010 requiring them to be expelled. c) Parliament forgot it had and Services Code was published requiring default trans inclusion d) Court reviewed c) in AEA v EHRC (2021) and lawful … until reviewed again in 2026

One should not fail to notice that what we have here is the UK Supreme Court deciding it can act like the US Supreme Court, and rule that the plain language of statute means something other than it does, decades after its passage.

Which is to say, if one is going to say "AI is actually intelligent" but then refuse it rights and agency, then I strongly suspect one either doesn't actually believe it is "intelligent" in any meaningful sense, or one is cool with owning slaves. One of these branches is ethically less problematic.

In an effort to protect the feelings of TERFs, the government has basically said that being called a bigot is worse than doing bigoted things, and that it's bigots whose rights we need to protect because their bigotry is something they feel very strongly about.

A message to all trans folks. . . St John's sees you and values you. We love you and care about you. You are welcome to be yourself with us. Everyone should be safe at St John's and we continue to work to make that so. Let us know if we can help. We are here for you.

A little reminder for Andy Burnham. There's no middle ground between people wanting to exist and people who don't want those people to exist. Ironicly, those positions are a binary. You can't exclude trans people from public life in a fair way. You can't do a genocide on us compassionately.

I don't think this is *wrong*, but never underestimate the ability of the British public to dissociate. We had a whole scandal showing "deport all the illegals!" meant police bashing down doors of Jamaican grandmas who've been here 70 years, and people horrified by that still couldn't join the dots.

People will remain convinced that the *real* bad Others who they want punished are somewhere else, unseen, even as their friends, neighbours, colleagues tell them that no, it's them, they're the ones being attacked.

"At first contact with re-entry into national politics, the great hope of the soft left has capitulated across the board"

This is brilliant: the re-introduction of beavers in the nature reserve next door has basically eliminated flooding at Greenford station on the Central Line. They could perhaps now set the furry engineers to work on getting the station’s inclined lift to work more reliably.