Category: Bullshit

  • Free speech snowflakes

    There are two pieces in the Guardian about a growing trend: people arguing that criticism is “silencing”. First up, Jack Bernhardt on comedy. we witnessed another great moment in comedy this week, when the BBC’s head of comedy asked the question we didn’t realise needed to be asked: is comedy dying because the internet is…

  • Women, know your place

    The FT asks, “can you be a mother and a senior law firm partner?” It’s not asking whether women are capable of the job, thankfully; it’s a piece about the assumptions made about women that aren’t made about men. The generally accepted issue is the choice many women face between partnership — on call 24/7 and…

  • Playing with fire

    This is from BBC Question Time this week: the question was pre-vetted, selected for broadcast and posted on social media to get publicity for the show. Is it morally right for the nation’s broadcaster to imply that “LGBT issues” may be immoral? If you don’t have your thesaurus handy, here are some synonyms for immoral:…

  • God’s money moves in mysterious ways

    OpenDemocracy previously reported the dark money being used by US evangelists to finance “grassroots” pressure groups. But the story is much, much bigger. US Christian right ‘fundamentalists’ linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of ‘dark money’ into Europe over the…

  • Stop us if you’ve heard these ones before

    I think what I hate most about bigots is their laziness. The stuff they write about trans people is just the stuff they said about gay people, with “gay” Tipp-Exed out and “trans” scribbled in its place. The Implausible Girl on Twitter has some examples. First, the silencing of people by a sinister lobby (2000):…

  • Preying on people with cancer

    The Cancer Act 1939 is one of the few pieces of legislation that outlaws pseudo-scientific medical bollocks. As Cancer Research explains: At its heart, the current incarnation of the Cancer Act is designed to protect cancer patients and the public from being bombarded with adverts for cancer treatments, from any source, including medical professionals, pharmaceutical…

  • The damage done

    Last year, anti-trans rabble-rouser James Kirkup wrote an article in The Spectator about the terrible rise of trans rights. Today, IPSO forced The Spectator to admit that the lurid claims at the centre of the story were complete and utter bullshit, invented by the writer. This happens an awful lot with trans stories: many of…

  • Just an ordinary day

    How’s your day going? Just after midnight, I saw The Economist tweet this. It turns out that the article was about Japan, and it has since been corrected with a less inflammatory headline. But as the writer Diana Tourjeé pointed out, “should trans people be sterilised?” is part of the regular media discourse on trans people…

  • Criticism of sex education, and why it’s wrong

    There’s yet another worrying development in the parents vs education story: Conservative politician Andrea Leadsom says that parents should get to decide when their children “become exposed to that information”. Writing in the TES a few weeks ago, Natasha Devon explains why the “kids are too young” argument and two others are wrong. When it…

  • “The lucrative gas-lighting industry”

    Writing in New Socialist, Pete Mitchell does a thoroughly entertaining demolition of two books making the culture war argument that “the left” is somehow silencing free speech. The whole thing’s worth a read but I particularly liked these bits: In Lukianoff and Haidt’s account, college students aren’t distressed because they’re facing unprecedented debt and insecurity,…