michael fletcher

The brilliant @pacificraft strikes again. (Listener)

The philosophy that we hold dear in World Athletics is the protection and the promotion of the integrity of women's sport. It is really important in a sport that is permanently trying to attract more women that they enter a sport believing there is no biological glass ceiling. The test to confirm biological sex is a very important step in ensuring this is the case. We particularly want to thank our Member Federations for their support and commitment in the implementation of these new regulations.

@donal_curtin Great graph! and yes, makes a lot of sense. (But what happened in about 2003 to 2007?)

This graph from BNZ Chief Economist Mike Jones, from the bank's latest Eco-Pulse publication, makes a lot of sense. Significant price rises for relatively non-discretionary things (rates etc) are currently eroding consumer confidence

🙄The fringe idea that we all have a 'gender identity' that may or may not match our biological sex is the whole point of this discussion. Trans activists act as though the existence of 'gender identity' is a settled, self-evident point, when to the vast majority of the world it's unevidenced, quasi-religious, pseudoscientific nonsense, which has been imposed top down on our society with serious consequences for vulnerable women and troubled youth in particular. Meaningful discussion about competing needs and rights cannot happen inside an elitist ideological bubble where everyone is forced to adopt gender ideology's approved jargon, accept its self-contradicting slogans as fact and pretend fact-light assertions and feeble sophistry are critical thinking. You tell us to 'educate' ourselves, by which you mean, 'adopt our beliefs unquestioningly,' but at this point, most of us know your arguments off by heart. These include, but are not limited to: feelings trump facts and unless we agree we're 'erasing people from existence'; women and girls aren't definable entities, so why should they be entitled to their own sports and single-sex spaces; clownfish and people with DSDs mean sex is 'on a spectrum' and 'woman' is a set of stereotypes associated with the female sex class, so it doesn't matter if you've got a penis, if you identify with those stereotypes you're 'valid'. The reason we haven't been won over by these talking points and remain so tragically 'uneducated' isn't that we've failed to grasp the sophistication of your world view. It's that we think you're talking unadulterated bullshit and making fools of yourselves.

Wonderfully ambiguous comment from the search expert guy: "I don't think they've gone too far" stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350444…

Having read up on a fair bit of everything written about Alice Munro over the last couple of months, I think my conclusion is never judge a book by its mother

The big four gentailers have been gouging consumers for decades. Massive excess profits year after year. The sector needs total reform. Here's an article I wrote for @NorthandSouthNZ magazine last year. Power Play northandsouth.co.nz/2023/11/13/are…

Being ripped off by a cosy cartel of gentailers has been going on for years. We need a total reform of the sector. This is the article I wrote for @NorthandSouthNZ last year.

High court rules the UK ban on puberty blockers is lawful. We seem, at last, to be moving back to treatment for vulnerable youth based on evidence-based medicine, as opposed to the unevidenced claims of ideological lobby groups. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/…

@tommygun1964 @MaxRashbrooke I'm now an ardent reader of Regional News. Three copies picked up from the supermarket are enough to light the woodburner for a week.

This weekend’s column looks at John Key’s bipartisan moment in 2007, over the anti-smacking bill, and asks: does Chris Luxon have it in him to do the same? And if so, what should be the issue? Hint: agreeing a pipeline of infrastructure projects. thepost.co.nz/nz-news/350340…

Ha! But has he actually been stolen, Michael? Or just sent back to NZ as a 501 and is currently somewhere near Christchurch?

Listening to #budget2024 this afternoon I am struck by how the word 'beneficiary' has two quite different meanings. The beneficiaries of @chrisluxonmp's and @NicolaWillisMP's Budget are a quite different group of people than the one most of us mean by the word.

This story just gets creepier and more ghastly with ever paragraph.

@coughlthom Oh, I don't know. We did tightly cropped in earlier times too

Best PM photo in more than a decade. Not a fan of Key/English colour, and Ardern’s had a weird amount of negative space above her head.

Remember how the meteorologists' term "Perfect Storm" entered the common vernacular, even to the point of cliche, a while back? I so hope "Path of Totality" does the same in 2024.

Every good mag should have a proper index. @NorthSouthNZ #Indexing