Barbara Thomas

I was skeptical, but now I’m completely convinced. Fencing will become super popular due to this one very particular improvement to the sport. “Sword tip visualization” It’s going to debut at the summer olympics. Every single duel will look like a bloody lightsaber fight

Brutal

Today we're celebrating a win for academic freedom in England. If you're wondering why universities lost sight of such a foundational value in the last ten years, I'd recommend watching this documentary. It features powerful interviews with @Docstockk and @hoovlet (And, for the eagle-eyed, footage of the UCL Women's Liberation WPUK 2020 conference protestors. #TheresNoCisInTeam!) bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00…

Wake up babe the Pope is Baudrillard posting

Exactly this

@LGBTQPrideUK You’re making my point for me. When you accuse someone like me - a black, disabled, atheist, lesbian feminist born and bred on the left - of being a white nationalist, you just start sounding hyperbolic and silly, quite honestly

Going back a couple of years, there were too many politicians who cast women sticking up for their rights and maintaining their boundaries in the face of self-ID as hateful or bigoted. I think this is welcome acknowledgement from Kezia Dugdale.

The 'Rhodesia Solution': How to use word tricks to 'disclose' a scandal to a Prime Minister while allowing him not to act. And to say, later on, that he wasn't really told...

Victor Glover explains why physical controls are better than touchscreens: “If I’m doing something where I’m so busy that I cannot stop and look down at my hands to fly, this is the biggest difference. I have to touch the screen, which means I have to look, because if I touch right next to that arrow, it doesn’t work. In Orion, I have a feel. I don’t have to look. I can focus on precision because I can look out the window the whole time.”

As someone who works for the publisher of @jo_bartosch and @robjessel16's book 'Pornocracy', I would like to thank @StroudBrewery for cancelling their event. Indefensible as it was, it has been a massive boon for publicity and sales. Top work

The Supreme Court ruling did not change the law a yr ago, it clarified it. Single sex spaces/provision IS the law. The guidance is irrelevant. If you want to change the law then put that through parliament. Greens/Lib Dems/Labour just be honest about it. Do the work. Stop lying.

It’s good to periodically prompt your chatbot about something you know exceptionally well, just to remind yourself that it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

ANGRY YOUNG WOMEN by @emilylawford and @Scarlett__Mag It was a Wednesday night and seven members of the University of Leeds’ feminist society had invited me to join their book swap. I asked how they felt about the young men they knew. “I don’t care for them,” said a girl called Ruby imperiously. “They’re not bad people, but they refuse to call out their friends who make other girls uncomfortable. They’ll laugh at jokes that are sexist, racist, homophobic, they don’t care about political issues… I don’t think they like women a lot.” If a man is attracted to you, she said, he might talk about things like toxic misogyny. If he doesn’t fancy you, he won’t bother. “I feel like a lot of it is quite sexually motivated with men.” I asked if they’d consider dating a man with different political views. They all immediately said no. “I don’t think I’d even be friends with one,” said one girl. “They don’t see you as human.” Only one woman, Evelyn, admitted to having male friends (though she was worried this made her a “pick me”, trying too hard for male attention). Evelyn was concerned about what the men she knew were watching online. “The stuff that’s being said about women is crazy,” she said. “They’re getting all these reels, talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think, not all men are like this, but…” On the internet, women and men have never been more alienated from each other. While the toxic, often hard-right politics of the manosphere have been exhaustively documented, the new generation of female influencers are nearly as extreme – just on the other side of the political spectrum. The “femosphere” spans a range of tones: there are misandrist dating coaches who urge women to reject men altogether, and more explicitly progressive content creators who cover global and domestic politics. Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. Young women are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men, and much less likely to feel the economy works in their favour. Gen Z women are more likely to support causes such as feminism, environmentalism and anti-racism than young men. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them. I spent the last few months in search of the new left-wing young women. It wasn’t difficult – they were everywhere. But it all felt impossibly bleak. They weren’t excited about their futures. They didn’t like the men they knew, or the idea of those they didn’t. Men were just a threat who had the potential to harm or trap them. This will almost certainly make relationships harder: fewer than half of young women feel men understand them. Young women are much less likely than men to date people who disagree with their politics. People will get lonelier, and angrier. Young women are twice as likely to not want children as young men. And it’s getting worse. Women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”. A significant majority of young women feel isolated from the rest of the country. The two main political parties aren’t reaching out to them specifically. Many women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. Many say they will vote for the Greens in the upcoming local elections, but few seem to believe that will make a difference. They don’t feel represented by mainstream politics, and they don’t think anyone cares. Cover art by Carl Godfrey

Seriously…short skirts and stilettos??? Have they so little respect for our female athletes that this unveiling is just sexist stereotypes? What a terrible message to send to our young girls.

Any service already operating lawfully should have had no difficulty in adapting to the SC judgment But vast numbers of services and employers were already acting unlawfully because lobby groups like @stonewalluk told them to. And now they can't work out how to get out of it /3

The hyperbolic language of "policing toilets" is used to sow confusion and panic. Services should have rules and enforce them, as they do for things like health & safety rules. Let's get away from semantic nonsense about "policing" and "enforcing". Just follow the law.

People have all of these wacky theories about why trail running seems to reduce overtraining injuries but I think the reality is that your “don’t fall down a ravine” instincts keep your pace reasonable in ways they do not when running on pavement

Really good post about the importance of exercise in aging populations. Don't accept "the narrowing" of your life.

Instead of removing juries, set up specialist courts where domestic abuse and sexual offences cases are given priority listing. It directly reduces delays for the most vulnerable. We know it works as it’s already happening in Preston Crown Court and Liverpool Crown Court.

This seems like a very strange decision given that the EFF is staying on all the other hellhole social media sites. A clearer rationale is owed to EFF supporters.