Avnir Soni @AvnirSoni

This goes to the heart of what has always baffled me about gender ideology. If a man says, “I am a woman”, what exactly does he mean? I know I am a man because of my biology. That’s it. There are plenty of other men with whom I have virtually nothing in common. I don’t know I’m male because of my hairstyle, the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, the sports I play or the films I watch. Nor because of what society has told me a man should be. Strip all of that away and the only thing I can pin being male down to is my biology. Everything else is personality, interpretation and socialisation. So when a biological male says he “feels like a woman”, what is he identifying with other than his own subjective conception of what being a woman feels like, divorced from the biology of being female? Even at a fairly shallow philosophical level, the circularity of the argument becomes apparent. And yet here we are, with media organisations, institutions and politicians having embraced something fundamentally subjective while its collision with biological reality has tangible consequences for women’s sex-based rights, safeguarding and vulnerable children. That is what I find so extraordinary about the entire debate.

@xipteras That's excellent focus!

I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday. If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence. The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin” but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?” Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism. As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope. In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.

Right now she's probably coming under intense pressure to recant. Don't leave her hanging. Stand beside her before it's obvious she needs you to.

Clay Travis @ClayTravis

a month ago

My prediction: you will start to see a ton of women’s athletes speak out now. They all knew this was BS, but knew they would get attacked for saying it. Sophie will take all the incoming, grow her fan base, and many others will follow her.

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I guess it’s finally time to tell my TERF origin story Loads of people suddenly started saying that men can literally be women & I thought ‘That’s mental.’ The end

every school should have a "fix-it lab" where students learn to repair their clothes, bikes and electronics. we should grow up knowing that not everything is disposable, that care and repair are part of living well on this planet.

@AJamesMcCarthy I discovered something like this was possible when I was reading around about what telescope to buy to see Jupiter better and came across your guide. I blame you for my sleepless nights!

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You go to work for 40 years (I'm currently at 42). You’re forced into auto‑enrolment. You play by the rules, you save into a pension on the promise it’s yours. Then Labour strolls in, waves through a law that lets ministers tell your scheme where to gamble those savings – not for your benefit, but to prop up their economic “strategy” and vanity infrastructure schemes that the market won’t fund. This isn’t prudence. It isn’t “modernisation”. It is a straightforward transfer of control from the saver to the state. Hands off our pensions. Share this before they pretend nobody noticed.

@injeneer_ondra Here's mine from a couple of nights ago, taken using seestar s50 as a dumb scope and camera, mounted on star adventurer 2i for better tracking. 315 x 45s frames. Processed in siril and setiastrosuite pro.

@BigKahunaRon Just captured very similar using my seestar s50 but used as a dumb scope + camera, mounted on sky watcher star adventurer 2i, all run using Nina (with manual mount). 315 x 45s exposures! Processed in siril and setiastrosuite pro.

We’ve had plenty of prior warnings. Britain should be operating a fleet of nuclear power stations providing all electricity. Instead we have a mish-mash of renewables backed-up by gas power stations. Enough with this nonsense.

A tax on unrealized capital gains can only be economically destructive.

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“The country that gave the world liberalism now treats free speech as a dangerous luxury.” From the Online Safety Act to Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs), it’s clear that the UK has a free speech crisis. Under the Orwellian Online Safety Act, internet users must prove they’re over 18 to access legal but ‘harmful’ content — including reading articles on Substack. We’ve also seen a democratically elected politician, Katie Lam, censored on X for sharing a clip of her speech in Parliament about the grooming gangs scandal. While NCHIs are reportedly set to be scrapped, the devil will be in the detail. Since their introduction in 2014, NCHIs have had a chilling effect on free speech and been used by activists to silence those they disagree with. We must defend — and champion — our proud tradition of free speech. Read more below 👇

@amazing_physics Hey, why no attribution!? I believe this photograph is a work of @AJamesMcCarthy

@_SmartUK What kind of exposures have you taken? Stacking in siril usually is fine.

Last night's #astrophotography Pleiades star cluster Camera: Panasonic FZ2000 176mm (480mm 35mm equivalent) at f4.5 iso 1600 Tracked using Skywatcher Star Adventurer pro 2i 130 x 60s frames with darks, flats and biases Stacked and processed in Siril, Astro DeNoise and GraXpert

A man who insists on using women’s changing rooms - and won’t take no for an answer - is considered to be a predator. And a potential risk to women and children. A man who puts on a dress (or merely *says* he’s a woman) - and won’t take no for an answer - is celebrated as strong and ‘brave’. And is somehow not considered to be a potential risk to women and children. That some people still cannot see how stupid this logic is … it’s really quite extraordinary.

It is not ‘hate’ to speak the truth. It is not ‘hate’ to defend the rights of women and girls. It is not ‘hate’ to be deeply worried about an unevidenced medical experiment on minors. Rationality goes out of the window when you pretend men can be women.

Concerned Citizen @BGatesIsaPyscho

11 months ago

“She (JK Rowling) believes if you’re born a Man then you can’t ever become a Woman” “Biologically she’s correct, but, when you introduce this level of hate into a Debate then rationality goes out the Window” Listen to Labour MP Carolyn Harris make an absolute fool of herself.

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If the UK state is accidentally releasing convicted sex offenders then why on earth should we ever trust it with our Digital ID? No thanks.

How can a woman be fined £150 for pouring a cup of coffee down a drain when water companies are still pouring billions of litres of shit into our rivers?

I sit in Parliament listening to these ministers, and it’s all just so depressing - the vast majority of them have never run a business, and it SHOWS. You would not believe how bad it is. They think ‘work’ means turning up to an office between 9 and 5, answering a few emails, and going home at the end of the day. Nice lunch break, few coffees away from the desk, probably a smoking break or several. It doesn’t - not for the millions of men and women who actually create the wealth that funds the state. Running a small business isn’t a job. It’s a way of life. It is life. It’s 24/7/365. It’s relentless. You are the accountant, HR department, compliance officer, cleaner, marketer, and customer service team - all in one. There’s no sick pay, no safety net, and no taxpayer-funded pension waiting for you. Holiday? Good luck. If you do manage to get away, it’s checking the phone all day, every day. Wife/husband obviously getting pissed off. We’ve all been there... It’s all on you. Every invoice chased, every tax deadline met, every bit of red tape navigated is on you. And if you make one mistake, one error, one small slip-up, the state comes after you - in a relentlessly efficient manner that is never afforded to us when we ask questions of it. Most MPs have no idea what that feels like. They just don’t. We’re going to see more of this in the budget I’m sure. More hurt. More pain. More tax. They don’t get it. They don’t understand that when a small business owner gets hit with another tax, it’s not absorbed by a ‘budget’ - it’s taken straight out of their family’s pocket. There is no ‘deficit’ in the business world - that’s called going bust. And they certainly don’t understand what real risk looks like. Politicians can vote through a policy on Monday and forget it by Tuesday - a small business owner lives with the consequences of that policy for years, decades. The MP monthly salary is safe. It always has been. In the public sector before, and in the public sector after - if not that, some charity/NGO funded entirely by the public sector. GET A REAL JOB. If MPs actually spent a week running a small firm - paying suppliers, tackling VAT, navigating health and safety law, sorting out HR issues, chasing clients for payment, trying to expand while staying compliant with everything from GDPR to local planning regulations - they’d legislate very differently. I can promise you that. They’d realise that most of Britain’s problems could be solved by the state doing less, not more. Cutting tax. Simplifying regulation. Slashing back the HRification of the country. Trusting people who actually produce things to get on with it. Instead, we have a political class that talks endlessly about ‘growth’ while brutally punishing the only people capable of delivering it - especially going after the family businesses/farms, which is a particularly spiteful policy decision. Small business owners are people who work harder than almost anyone in Parliament could imagine - and who are treated worse for it. Britain’s small businesses don’t succeed because of politicians, they survive in spite of them.