Panto_Villan

It's fantastic, but you have to remember it was written in the before times when politics was a little easier to parody. It's not actually a documentary about current events.

I think the lettuce is the unity candidate the Tories need

I bet Grant Schapps is pretty happy with his time at the Home Office!

I’m sure he’s fine with the Tories stealing his thunder and using it to further destroy themselves. In fact I bet he can’t believe his luck.

There’s only been one new PM since they won a landslide. Truss is no less legitimate than Brown was when Blair handed over to him in that sense. I think a second unelected PM would be stretching things a bit far though.

“We’ve brought Boris back to steady the ship”

She’s another Truss. The only hope the Tories have of steadying the ship is appointing someone safe like Hunt or Sunak, but as you say they’d still get thumped in a general election. If you want safe and sensible why would you vote for them over Starmer?

No, you're right that the physical strength imbalance isn't there. But I think the issue is you're conflating trans people with people who are pretending to be trans in order to take advantage of the situation. The first group might have more muscle than the average woman but that doesn't really matter if they're not any more likely to commit sexual offences than the average person. Whereas it's the second group that are the ones responsible for the majority of the incidents you're referring to - those are the people you need to filter out, not actual trans women. I feel like that distinction often gets missed by people with strong views on both sides.

Something I read today that I found a bit concerning is that the terrain around Kherson that makes re-taking it difficult (lots of open fields where artillery and long-range anti-tank weapons can smash up the Ukrainians as they mass for an attack) actually makes up most of the occupied land in the south. If that's true, then Ukraine reclaiming all of their territory is going to be very difficult. The gains made around Kharkiv were helped by terrain that provided plenty of cover, and the (very slow) progress around Kherson was enabled by smashing the bridges over the river and cutting / reducing the flow of supplies to the Russian forces stationed there. I'm not sure what the plan will be if the Ukrainians wanted to attack towards say Melitopol given they can't use either of those tactics there.

I apparently made the mistake of not reading the news this afternoon. This thread has got about 30 pages longer. Can someone summarise to me what's happened?

I understand your point, but I think the points @Chindie and @TheAuthority have made here are valid. You have to balance the needs of both biological women and trans people in the debate, and if you make an assessment based too heavily on perceived risk then you get into dangerous territory. For instance, by definition a gay bloke is much more likely to rape another man than a straight guy is, but we don't exclude them from male toilets because of that (although I'm sure that argument was being made in previous decades). Also, you have to consider what the alternative is. Is it not going to lead to some pretty hostile situations requiring fully transitioned trans women to continue using male bathrooms, given it's not necessarily obvious that they started out as biological men? As others have said, everything I've seen suggests that statistically the risks to trans people are generally higher than the risk they pose to others. I think the solution society is going to end up with is that certified trans women are allowed to enter female safe spaces like toilets and shelters if they choose (or continue to use male spaces if they feel more comfortable doing so), but you need to be undergoing or have completed the actual medical process of transitioning to your new gender in order to be legally recognised as trans. I can't really see any other solution working. If we decide it's too offensive to trans people to expect there to be some kind of certification process, we're completely destroying the concept of female safe spaces by allowing anyone to pretend to be trans in order to access them. If we decide trans people shouldn't be allowed to access female safe spaces, I think society is then failing its duty of care to a different group of vulnerable people.

Had a quiet morning at work so put the new episode of Andor on. Quieter than last week, but I’d still like Disney to inject this show directly into my veins.

This is one of the new anti-personnel HIMARS warheads that the Ukrainians are using (containing thousands of tiny tungsten balls, like a giant hand grenade). I almost feel sorry for the Russians; I would NOT like to be near one of those when it went off.

I think we’re unlikely to see F16s any time soon given the US won’t provide long range ATACAMS missiles for the MLRS they’ve given Ukraine. Apparently the current air defence tech the Ukrainians have (including the modern Western stuff sent recently) doesn’t really work against ballistic missiles. Problem is a single Patriot battery costs a billion dollars, and Ukraine is a big country. So let’s hope regime change in Iran does happen.

Sorry to hear that!

To be fair you’ve fixated on toilets yourself. I said “safe spaces for women” in my original post. Toilets are the least important of them. Do you think different if we’re talking about rape shelters? Why would vulnerable children need protecting but not vulnerable women? It’s also not fair to say asking trans people to go through some kind of one-off process to verify they are trans is implying they are untrustworthy and dangerous. Does medically checking people when disability benefits are granted imply all disabled people are fraudsters? Of course not, but it’s still necessary to weed the fraudsters out.

If someone was applying for something specifically reserved for gay or lesbian people or black people (e.g. a bursary or scholarship), then yeah I'd expect some verification process in place. If you just allow anyone to self-identify as part of those groups without any external verification then it's pretty clearly not going to work.

Presumably if a man walked into a female toilet wearing a wig and a dress, in most cases there will be more women in there than he can control at once and at least one will go and complain to whoever owns the establishment and the bloke will be thrown out and potentially arrested because he's not actually allowed to be there. But if the man is legally entitled to be there because he's declared himself a woman and no further process is required, nobody can object to his presence (in fact, logically the woman who ran off to ask him to be thrown out is being transphobic and could be reported to the police for a hate crime). But that's a bad argument anyway, because using that logic we shouldn't bother vetting teachers for previous sexual convictions because they could just snatch children outside school hours so we shouldn't even bother trying to make it harder for them.

Regarding point b), do you think Norton regards being chased off Twitter by an angry mob as "accountability" then?

It doesn't really surprise me it's ended up here. Rowling's experience of trans people and their activists is just an endless torrent of abuse, whereas the people that are willing to support her are going to have negative views of trans people. It's an echo chamber that's just going to make her views increasingly extreme over time. To echo the point I made in the racism thread a week or two ago, I think it's important for activists to accept that the rest of society is entitled to a say in these matters too. For instance, some trans activists are pushing for both gender self-identification and for trans women to be allowed access to all female safe spaces. Having both obviously presents a problem because a male sexual predator can self-identify as a woman and access these spaces. To be clear this isn't claiming trans people are sexual predators, it's just saying that their proposals create a loophole other people may exploit - and that all groups have some obligation to society to accept inconvenience in order to protect other parts of society (think teachers and their criminal checks, anyone going through airport security, etc). I think it's a bit of a shame that the debate around transgenderism is so poisonous that anyone who isn't fully behind trans rights has to deal with so much hate they inevitably end up going off the deep end. Trans activists clearly need to stand up for their own rights, but society does need moderate, sensible voices to stand up for the other groups affected by these changes too.

Apologies, yes. It went up to £2,500 at the start of this month instead of £3,500, didn't it? Looks like what I was reading actually said that the guarantee was expected to become cost free imminently because of the huge decline in wholesale costs. Yeah, you're right about the standing charges going up a lot. But while the costs for bailing out all the energy companies are passed onto the surviving ones that that will factor into the rises, apparently companies just get to choose what standing charge they want to charge people and this sits outside the standard cap. So it varies heavily from provider to provider.

Not sure where you're getting this info from? The current predictions are that the price cap will cost the government nothing this winter because wholesale prices have fallen far enough that household prices are never going to reach the cap.

You must have been quite unlucky to not be eligible for any of the covid help for ltd businesses, as they threw a lot of money around. It was mostly the recently self-employed that got left out. Anyone with a fixed premises that paid business rates got help, for example. And everyone was entitled to use the furlough scheme, right? Furlough helped an awful lot to cushion the blow for my business. Also as a business owner you always have the option to just pay yourself entirely through salary and then you pay income tax just like everyone else does. This just brings your tax rate closer into line with everyone else's. I'd prefer it if corproration tax remained at 20% because it'd benefit me personally but if a tax needs to go up, corporation tax is one of the best candidates.

It’ll be interesting to see what the OBR say when they cost it out. It’s a pretty punchy rise, although not to the point of being unfair. Like you I’m guessing it’ll raise quite a bit of revenue.

Looks like they didn’t even need to use much CG for the landscapes - seems like they filmed the Cruachan Dam, which is actually a really cool looking piece of architecture. Looks like all they had to do was CG a big gate in the front! Yeah it feels obvious now you mention it. Wonder if he lives in the UK or something?Pretty much everyone else in the show except Diego Luna and Skaarsgard is British.