Non-dairy Canary

Morality is a moveable feast.

When people claim to be 'on the right side of history';, what they usually mean is 'I haven't got a good argument for my position right now, so I'm banking on one turning up in the future.'

'Young lesbians should be left alone to complete their puberty.'

I'm not averse to the idea that young lesbians might be supported as they complete their puberty.

What I'm averse to is telling them they're boys.

Fortunately perhaps, the demography of the UK electorate does not wholly consist of retired Army NCOs with 22 years service.

I’m not a huge fan of flag-waving, but that seems like the right way to do it.

Who is Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's new supreme leader? Many expect the 56-year-old, who has largely kept a low profile, to continue his father's hardline policies.

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss*

* Only much angrier, because you killed his father.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Spot on. And you can bet that they don't stint when it comes to flying the flag from every available public building.

Don't know if it's still the case, but there was a time when the larger, more colourful and more strangely shaped a country's postage stamps, the poorer, more autocratic and more oppressive of its own citizens was the nation that produced them.

This smells the same.

Sarah Pochin MP: 'A Reform government will proudly fly our Union flag from every government and local authority building, every publicly funded institution, and everywhere from courtrooms and police stations to town halls.'

Well, that's the parsnips well and truly buttered.

Given what Donald Trump has done since receiving the very first FIFA Peace Prize, perhaps Gianni Infantino would like to consider awarding FIFA's inaugural I Can Keep Secrets trophy to the Andrew formerly known as Prince.

Not so much shallow as bone dry.

Stretching the idea of a 'debut album' to breaking point, mind.

But sea horses are not horses. Just as trans women are not women. So yeah, that works.

That's what we call irony.

Portrait of Lise Meitner taken in 1928. She is smoking a cigarette and looking impatient to get back to her experiments.

Last week, I mentioned this in passing in a workshop:

In 1938 Enrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize for discovering two new elements of the periodic table.

Lise Meitner shortly showed that Fermi was mistaken and instead had produced known lighter elements by fission.

She did not win a Nobel prize.

It’s a complex issue, involving psychological, sociological, political and medical pressures.

I don't think it helps to speculate that one cause fits all. As @sexmatters2quakers.bsky.social puts it: ‘The individual stories matter.’

I don’t know why you specify a particular age. There are certainly plenty of girls who identify as trans. What is the point you are making?

Autogynephilia certainly figures, but it’s a label rather than an explanation. Nor is it the whole story. For a start, by definition, it doesn’t occur in girls.

What is the cause of the distress?

Adam is creepiness personified, busting in on Rex and Alice with all the respect and sensitivity of Donald Trump waltzing in to the Miss World contestants' changing rooms. #TheArchers

If you start from an affirmatory position, that a child is trapped in the wrong body, then hormones and surgeries are the inevitable approach.

Children deserve a higher standard of thinking. Children deserve clinicians who think deeper about the issues the underpin distress.

Can confirm this is still a masterpiece, and I still had something in my eye at the end, but Anton Walbrook’s line about the gangsters putting the decent people in prison lands a little differently now

Conclusion: LSD makes your hair grow.

War is peace.
Peace is war.
Ending a war is starting a war.
Starting a war is ending a war.

It makes Orwell look prosaic.

Tracy: "Ooh Helen, you look all glowy!"
Helen: That must be because finally I feel in control of my own destiny."

Peak irony in #TheArchers

st, 2 March, 2026 Where's the equality act to include and protect trans people? And don't you think they should be berated every single second until they pull their finger out and get back in Parliament and do a proper equality law now, now they have an overwhelming super majority, they have to be forced too, by voting Green, rather than the current state laying the groundwork for reform. Get a printer, canon pixma is probably the best, cheapest, and easiest to use, and print your own leaflets on issues that matter to your parliamentary seat & local election wards and post them in your area, leave them on trains at bus stops in shopping centres and other mass footfall areas, online cannot be relied on.

Yes, that's lovely. I wondered for a moment if they might be on commission from Canon, but then I realised that barking mad is not necessarily a good look in somebody spruiking your product.

What a thread.

No doubt? Really?

While I acknowledge that societal pressures exist, I don’t accept for a moment that there is no individual choice. It’s not black and white.

Yes, me too.

That’s a very bleak picture of human behaviour you’re painting. I’m not so sure that we can know his motives. Perhaps he simply wasn’t comfortable with the prospect of leaving a 14yo at the mercy of a gang?