Category: Uncategorized

Facebook group for breastfeeding women, with over 57,000 members, has banned ‘gendered language’.

Posts that begin “hey ladies” or “hey mamas” will be immediately deleted.

This is the continued erasure of the concept of womanhood and motherhood. pic.twitter.com/bAlgcM3P3R

— James Esses (@JamesEsses) September 16, 2025

From the Daily NK:

North Korea has issued an order to replace maps of the Korean Peninsula displayed in state agency offices nationwide with maps showing only the northern half of the peninsula, coinciding with the nation’s Foundation Day on Sept. 9. The state appears to be accelerating efforts to erase concepts of reunification and a single Korean nation in line with the leadership’s doctrine of “two hostile states.”

The newly issued maps feature “Map of Choson” written in bold letters at the top, using North Korea’s term for Korea. A box on the left side displays a red slogan: “The powerful civilized nation we are building is a socialist cultural state where the socialist culture blossoms and flourishes in all its brilliance, a land where the people, endowed with lofty creative ability and a high level of cultural refinement, create and enjoy the most advanced civilization at the highest level — Kim Jong Un.”

At the lower right is a legend explaining symbols for monuments idolizing the Kim family, including “statues of the great leaders Comrade Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong Il,” “major revolutionary battle sites,” and “major revolutionary history sites.”

The maps also display national capitals; provincial, city, and county seats; national borders and provincial boundaries; major roads; mountains and valleys; salt farms; ports and seaways; and other points of interest.

Most significantly, the new maps label South Korea as “Hanguk”—the South Korean term for Korea. South Korea appears filled in gray with no administrative districts or place names specified. The maps use South Korea’s formal name rather than “South Choson,” as the North has long called it, labeling it simply by name in the same font and text size used for China and Russia.

This treatment suggests North Korea now views South Korea as a separate, foreign entity rather than part of a single nation, reflecting the leadership’s “two hostile states” doctrine. North Korea has been working to erase concepts of shared national identity and reunification with the South since declaring that North and South were “two hostile states in a state of war” during a ruling party plenary session in late December 2023….

As authorities distribute the maps, they have ordered agencies to indoctrinate members to refer to South Korea as “Hanguk” rather than “South Choson” and to view South Korea as a foreign country, not the southern half of a single Korean nation.

After the Piers Morgan debacle, when Laurie Penny proudly declared herself to be trans and non-binary but couldn't quite manage to explain what she was talking about, Victoria Smith takes a deeper look at what's really going on:

Non-binary is the gender identity you end up claiming if you’re a feminist who’s made the category “woman” uninhabitable for any female human with an ounce of self-respect.

Judith Butler now lays claim to they/them pronouns, and advocates for what she calls “gender freedom”, suggesting that if anyone doesn’t like the “woman” box, they’re welcome to jump right out of it. That doing so might impose intolerable costs — for instance, in terms of the resources, legacies, research, spaces, boundaries to which one may lay claim — is ignored, presumably because they’re not the kind of cost which have much impact on someone of Butler’s status.

A point many gender critical feminists have made over the years is that if we agreed with the regressive, stereotype-laden definitions of gender ideologues — if we, too, saw gender as a spectrum between Barbie and GI Joe — then we’d be non-binary as well.

Women like Laurie Penny and Judith Butler have accepted the male/trans stereotype of a woman as passive, blank, a receptacle for male desires, etc. etc.. So they decide, unsurprisingly, that they themselves are actually not silly women like that, but something much better – non-binary! You'd think it would make more sense, from a feminist perspective, to challenge this gender stereotype of a woman rather than decide that you're not one, but this whole trans/queer theory world view depends on gender stereotypes, and they really really don't want to see that. Plus, it makes them special – which is always nice.

After publishing some "circumspect, polite" essays in 2018  wondering whether transwomen were really women, Kathleen Stock was shocked by the response – particularly one from a trans-identified grad student – "I haven’t witnessed it myself, but I am totally sure some trans women have in response to the Stock article talked about how precisely they would like to violently kill and dismember Stock. This is just something that happens in conversations about TERF’s." On expressing her concern, Stock found that many of her her academic colleagues chided her – expressing support, rather, for the poor maligned grad student.

From her X post:

Since then (and faced with many other such crazy-making cases) I have had to come to terms with the fact that there are many, many professional academics who will never back down from their basic quasi-religious belief that me and a few other philosophers must be the bad guys for criticising the presuppositions of transactivism- because they have to hang on to their own self-identification as the good guys, and they need the foil. It is not enough to disagree with us, – that is normal in academia – they have to conjure up poisonous caricatures of who we are.

Only this week a paper was published in a supposedly quality feminist journal (Hypatia) which accused Holly Lawford-Smith's work of propping up Neo-Nazi beliefs. An editor passed that for publication. Referees passed that. There is an astonishing casualness about the way that academics will excuse such inflammatory language, and turn the responsibilty back on the target, with an implied "well, if you didn't say such things…". Of course, they can never really point to what we did actually say, in any depth or with suitable context – for who has the time? They all just rely on the testimony of other earlier caricatures, and so the lie spreads.

When I heard about Charlie Kirk I was in Berlin, at a conference about non-medicalised approaches to gender dysphoria – you know, aimed not at stopping puberty or giving teenagers life-altering hormones, or cutting their body parts off, but trying to give them effective therapy instead – a good aim, right? Or at least a well-intentioned one, even if you disagree with it. Transactivists had vowed to find the conference and disrupt, and had put up a social media account called "know your enemy", and my face was the first on the list. They spent the weekend posting people outside every major hotel to find us. I had a security guard meet me at the airport and take me back there, I barely left the hotel. That is the real consequence of academics' stupid, unthinking, defensive attempts to portray themselves as heroes and make out we are evil villains. And if the story eventually ends with something very bad, god forbid, I know for a fact there will be philosophers who will imply it was deserved, and dig out mangled half-truths or lies to back it up; and there will be hundreds of others who will say nothing in disagreement.

A history of blatantly racist comments on social media would normally ensure that you wouldn't be picked up for major promotion by a leading store. Antisemitism, though…no problem. From the Telegraph:

In July, beauty influencer Huda Kattan, founder of Huda Beauty, posted a TikTok to her 2m followers. Dressed cosily in heart-patterned pyjamas, she chatted to the camera, her head sweetly cocked to one side, leaning into her perfectly French-manicured hand.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” she said in an intimate, husky tone. What she had been seeing, the Iraqi-American then explained, was “all of the conspiracy theories coming out and a lot of evidence behind them that Israel has been behind the First World War, the Second World War, September 11 and October 7.”

At the time, the American Jewish Committee condemned the “spread of vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories”, and the post was taken down.

That was in July. Fast forward to September, and Boots in the UK has Kattan’s face plastered in supersize format across the windows of their Covent Garden store.

“It feels like Boots are condoning anti-Semitism,” says Deborah Lyons, designer and co-founder of Fashion and Beauty Against Anti-Semitism (FABAA), which was formed in the wake of October 7. “It’s shocking – especially considering the accountability we expect nowadays for issues like racism and sexual harassment.”

Kattan, whose brand Huda Beauty has an Instagram following of 57.3m – the size of the English population – has a track record on social media. Content she has reposted on her personal accounts includes sentiments such as “Zionists are the new Nazis” and “If the Jews had it their way, they’d kill anybody that opposes them”, as well as other conspiracy theories, including claims that Israel was involved in the genocide in the Congo.

Implausible, I'd suggest.

A Boots spokesperson added: “At Boots we take our core values of inclusivity, tolerance and kindness very seriously. We have been discussing the issue directly with the brand as a priority and will actively continue to do so. We have been absolutely clear on the importance of our inclusivity values in those discussions and will continue to closely monitor the situation.”

Ha.

They're certainly picking up on the youth mood. They'll never be targeted by an angry mob for having links to Israel.

Maybe Bob Vylan as the next big promotion. They "advocate for healthy lifestyles which include not drinking or smoking, and eating plant-based wholefoods", as well as encouraging their followers to "hunt down Zionists". Perfect.

This is complete nonsense from beginning to end, but kind of compelling for its utter inanity. The woman interviewed, Doaa Saif Al-Dine, is Egyptian Professor of Israeli Studies at Ain Shams University, which makes the whole thing even more absurd.

For instance, the gas chambers:

They were closed rooms with no window for the air to get out, except for a small hole through which car exhaust would be pumped. They would put several Jews inside this room and they would breathe the car's carbon dioxide until they died of suffocation. How does the book [Imperium, see below] explain this point? It says that if Jews had been put into closed rooms and made to breathe a car's exhaust it would have required the car to run continuously for between twenty minutes and an hour and fifteen minutes. This completely contradicts the situation that existed during World War 2 when there was an energy crisis that forced German scientists under Hitler to develop new machines that were air-cooled, and produced and operated in a different way.

Umm..

The book she cites, Imperium, was written in 1948 by Francis Parker Yockey:

Francis Parker Yockey (September 18, 1917 – June 17, 1960) was an American lawyer, Fascist, and Pan-European Nationalist ideologue, known for his neo-Spenglerian book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, published in 1948 under the pen name Ulick Varange, which called for a Neo-Nazi European empire.

Yockey supported far-right causes around the world and remains an influence of White Nationalist and Neo-fascist movements. Yockey was an antisemite, a reverent proponent of German Nazism, and an early Holocaust denier.

Not quite as positive as hoped, perhaps. From the Daily NK:

North Korea’s General Staff Department conducted a tactical exercise simulating the first week of a war on the Korean Peninsula and reported the results to the party’s Central Military Commission. The General Staff Department plans to develop measures for each military branch and specialty based on the exercise results and incorporate them into the army’s regular winter exercise beginning Dec. 1….

The General Staff Department digitized the data based on the mock war’s progression, using a time scale, and replayed the war using a computer program to produce attrition and combat sustainability indexes, which were included in the final report.

In the actual report, the scenario showed the loss of air and naval superiority in the first two days of the war, the launch and interception of some of the Strategic Force’s missiles on Days 3 and 4, infiltration attempts by the Army and Special Operation Force on Days 5 and 6, and the seizure of complete operational initiative on Day 7.

The report’s conclusion stated that the North Korean military would likely be at a disadvantage in the early phases of a war, which was duly reported to the party’s Central Military Commission.

In its analysis of each service branch, the report noted that if the Air Force fails to gain air superiority in the early stages due to inferior forces, limitations could arise in joint operations with the Navy’s flotillas, which operate separately in the East Sea and Yellow Sea. Moreover, as the Air Force’s airborne early warning (AEW) capabilities remain unverified, the service’s AEW and control operations face limitations.

Regarding the Army and Special Operation Force, the report said that even if early armed clashes and deep infiltrations were possible, given the enemy’s extensive surveillance capabilities and precision strikes, operational sustainability would be difficult to ensure, and North Korea would face limitations in maintaining supply lines and long-range mobility.

As for the Strategic Force, its missiles and nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent and retaliatory threat, but they were at high risk of being detected before launch or intercepted, the report said. However, it also stated that, given how South Korea, the United States, and Japan’s multilayered missile defense system (Aegis–THAAD–PAC-3) reduces the threat rather than completely neutralizing it, some of North Korea’s simultaneous launches or saturation strikes would likely succeed, depending on the war’s development.

Well that's nice. Things may go badly, and most of the nuclear attacks would likely be detected before launch, but some would probably get through.

They're taking all this very seriously – threatening a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. Is Trump part of the intended audience here? 

It's unfortunate that the South Korean presidency, in its endless see-sawing between hawk and dove towards the North, is now in a dove phase under president Lee Jae Myung. 

The October 7 survivor trashed by the Eurovision juries won the popular vote… and the October 7 documentary originally banned by the Canadian festival producers won the people's choice award.

Elites might hate Israel. The people beg to differ! pic.twitter.com/8v6hjeXPKY

— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) September 14, 2025

Here:

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) delivered a surprising outcome on Sunday when "The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue" captured the People’s Choice Award for best documentary. The honor capped weeks of heated debate over whether the film would even appear at the festival.

Directed by Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich, the documentary tells the story of retired IDF General Noam Tibon, who risked his life on October 7, 2023, to rescue his son and family as Hamas terrorists stormed Kibbutz Nahal Oz. Produced by Mark Selby, the project ultimately debuted at TIFF after facing the threat of removal from the lineup….

The road to TIFF was turbulent. Organizers initially withdrew the film over legal and security concerns tied to Hamas-sourced footage from the October 7 attacks. Outcry from Jewish community leaders in Canada, political figures in Israel, and international supporters led to negotiations. Festival CEO Cameron Bailey later reinstated the screening after reaching a compromise with Avrich. The premiere drew a standing ovation inside the theater while sparking protests outside Roy Thomson Hall.

We heard the other day about Spain's problem with Jews. And now:

The Vuelta a España, Spain’s most important cycling race, was cancelled as it reached its climax on Sunday when thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators invaded the finish point in central Madrid during clashes with police.

Earlier Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, said the protests which have taken place in every city through which the Vuelta has passed filled him with “pride”, as Spain’s relations with Israel reached a new low.

Vying with Ireland for the title of Europe's most antisemitic country. A mob, encouraged by the government, ruining the Vuelta for all the cyclists and cycling fans. Bravo.

Organisers decided they had no choice but to call off the grand finale as the capital was filled with Palestinian flag-waving demonstrators, some of whom broke through security cordons to occupy the capital’s landmark streets in order to prevent competitors from reaching the finish line.

Charlie Walsham, a pseudonymous BBC News employee, on the Beeb's capture by the gender lobby. At the Spectator:

I hesitate to say it, but I believe this could be the worst scandal ever to hit the BBC, and that – I realise – is saying something.

Why? Because unlike the horrors of the Jimmy Savile revelations or, more recently, Huw Edwards’s appalling conduct, the BBC has, in effect, made all its journalists complicit in the mainstreaming of a dangerous social media contagion that has caused real-world harms.

The BBC has kneeled at the altar of trans activism, putting virtue-signalling progressivism ahead of hard-headed realism and impartiality. In doing so, it has amplified the calumny that anyone who believes women’s sex-based rights matter, and that being a woman is more than a costume or a set of behaviours, is a bigot who must be condemned, cancelled and ostracised. More damningly, it has played a part in convincing an entire generation of children who are experiencing entirely normal growing pains, or discovering their true sexuality, that they may have been ‘born in the wrong body’.

Time for Director General Tim Davie to go.