Yes: I was thinking earlier about when James Kirkup said “Ok, this subject has got traction now, so I’m going to stop writing about it so that there’s more space for women to do so”, and… got replaced by Hayton.
There’s huge institutional/ civil service inertia, which seems to be stopping real progress. The London / Twitter classes are still very pro-gender.
That guy is so creepy, even for a TIM.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/10/the-trans-movement-will-only-become-more-orwellian/
Back in the days before feminism became the opposite of its true meaning, we worried that men dressing as sexualised parodies of women was sexist and offensive.
To explain: men who both dress as women and claim to be women are now taking umbrage at men who dress as women for fun. The former believe the latter are making light of something deadly serious. Many feminists will see that they are all men masquerading as women – but the important distinction is that drag queens don’t generally demand access to women’s hospital wards, rape crisis centres and prison wings.
Jonathan Sumption:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/our-academics-are-attacking-the-whole-concept-of-knowledge/
However, the main objection to decolonisation is not that it is false but that it is narrow-minded, obsessive and intolerant. People will continue to disagree about the prevalence and the origin of racial prejudice. Error and discord are inevitable hazards of the free market in ideas. But the decolonisers are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them. This is a natural consequence of their approach to intellectual inquiry. For those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs there is no point in debate. Alternative visions of the world are just the product of social conditioning. Social change and suppression of dissent are the only answers. Schools and universities must be the battlegrounds. Hence the obligatory decolonisation statements, the imposition of a highly controversial agenda on the syllabus, the no-platforming of opponents and the real fears of so many academics that if they step out of line their careers will be blighted.
Dozens of scientists have now signed an open letter to Nature Medicine calling for the paper to be retracted.
One of the signatories, Prof Neil Harrison, professor of anaesthesiology, molecular pharmacology and therapeutics at Columbia University, said: “Virologists and their allies have produced a number of papers that purport to show that the virus was of natural origin and that the pandemic began at the Huanan seafood market.
“In fact there is no evidence for either of these conclusions, and the email and Slack messages among the authors show that they knew at the time that this was the case.
B Lab UK takes equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies and adds a ‘J’ for social justice, using its “JEDI” principles to “make business a force for good”.
The non-profit is also promoting the Better Business Act — which it helped draft — that aims to amend Section 172 of the Companies Act 2006.
Campaigners from the Free Speech Union (FSU), in a report on B Corp, claim the move, if successful, could lead to controversial social justice and EDI policies being cemented in UK companies.
I’ve been vaguely following the recent twists and turns about the Benin Bronzes. It’s a complicated situation that makes the Elgin Marbles look straightforward.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/benin-bronzes-nigeria-western-museums/674650/
The return of benin art to Nigeria is advanced as a great moral reckoning. In all my many conversations with Nigerians, including those most scornful of their government, I have met very few who did not hope to see the Benin treasures eventually return home. Yet as it is being executed, the return is likely to end by converting public art collections into private wealth on a large scale.
Some proponents of repatriation argue that whatever happens next to the Nigerian treasures is nobody’s business but Nigeria’s. […]
It’s an argument that resonates with many in the West, especially if they do not linger too long over it. It depends on reading “Nigeria” as a single entity, erasing individuality from the story. It’s not going to be “Nigeria” that makes the choice to sell or to display the Benin bronzes. It’s going to be one person and one family, who prevailed in a fierce political contest for control of art assets together worth hundreds of millions of dollars or more. Among those parties fighting for control of the objects, there were few true innocents.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/science-fiction-the-crisis-in-research/
The vast majority of scientists are honest, but recent years have seen many cases of scientific misconduct come to the surface, implying there is a systemic problem. The financial and reputational rewards that come with headline-generating results make research fraud all too tempting. High–profile papers on stem cells, superconductivity, psychological priming, drug efficacy and ocean-heat content have been retracted.
Retraction Watch, an organisation that pushes journals to withdraw dodgy studies, estimates that 5,000 papers are retracted a year but that this is a tiny fraction of how many should be. And they argue that most scientists who retract papers suffer no career setback, while ‘the ones whose papers haven’t been retracted have even fewer worries’.
Was anyone else slightly hoping he’d keep reaching for the gun? I know I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it.
Qatar, not Iraq, and it’s sanctioned money being unfrozen and ring-fenced for humanitarian use.
James Kirkup was covering this long before anyone else was. He deserves credit for that. That domain was only registered in October 2019, and he’d been writing about this before that.
Hope you didn’t miss them. It is very warm still, they might be a bit out of sync.
Pooch used to love going to the pet store. They had rabbits, just sitting there. So much drool…..
I believe men have had this problem for centuries.
He sounded like an arse anyway.
Sadly she’s from an Uber-woke (and wealthy) family, so she’s not likely to get it.
I saw this a few days ago, and it’s basically the same thing that’s been happening in the UK for a while: smaller branches just have a row of paying in / out machines with staff there to help if you get stuck. It’s not great, at all, but it’s not new.