It actually sounds like he and Tolkein would get on really well

Absolutely

Global warming’ gave us that senator with the snowball

In an ideal world we wouldn’t have to moderate accurate terms to prevent bad actors making dumb arguments

But this is clearly not an ideal world

Bill is the pony that travels with the Fellowship from Bree to the Mines of Moria. I hope he has a good birthday

This book was funded and published by Uri Tzafon, an extremist fringe group that even the Israeli Government distance themselves from

I’m not pointing this out to try and downplay the genocide in Gaza or ignore illegal settlements, and of course there’s a discussion to be had about the extent to which small radical factions can reflect and influence the political mainstream

But its a bit disingenuous to present this as just an ‘Israeli Children’s Book’. It’s kinda like calling Nick Fuentes an ‘American Journalist’

I don’t know why you are using in person community praxis as a refutation of an online space being toxic

Real life isn’t online, the issue is an online space being shitty

Hey man, he had bone spurs, you ableist (/s)

I’d argue that TERF-ism, especially JKR’s brand of it, has both classist and racist elements ingrained within it

The whole ideology is based around gatekeeping ‘womanhood’ to a single shared demographic experience, denying feminism to those outside of it

There are ways in which trans women have had differing experiences of femininity from cis women. But the same is true of black women of white women, etc

It might be explicitly anti-trans; but it’s implicitly anti-in-group

Who is this mythical ‘Britain’ that is saying this? Is it the King? Is it Farage? Or is it the 8% of our population with South Asian heritage? We’re a multi-cultural nation. The colonial and imperial roots of that absolutely can’t be ignored, but they don’t erase the stake that BAME people have in this country.

Some British people originally came from the sub-continent; get over it

I’m not denying the fucked up colonial history. You seem to be denying that South Asian immigrants are British - they are

Well, they were British chefs with South Asian heritage who of course were indirectly here because of horrific Imperialism

But it is British, its very British. Despite what Farage and co want you to believe, we’re a multi-cultural nation and have been for centuries.

British-Indian cuisine is at this point distinct and diverse enough from traditional Indian cuisine that it is its own thing. And its super widespread - even the racists discuss how shitty they are over a curry

“Simpon, huh? New man?”

“Actually sir, he thwarted your campaign for Governer. You ran over his son. He saved the plant from meltdown. His wife painted you in the nude.”

“Uh, doesn’t ring a bell”

I suppose I’d call myself more curious than sceptical - I could look shit up and I can’t be bothered - but how do you define when humans became humans? I imagine its an estimate based from anthropological and fossil records and stuff

I was sceptical of this claim so I did some research - 700,000 is almost certainly too high, but other than that it’s disturbingly true:

The 700,000 number comes from a Russian parliamentarian in 2023, and refers to orphaned and abandoned children Russia has ‘protected’ from conflict zones in Ukraine. A later Russian report walked this back a bit, and claimed that most of this number were children accompanied by family voluntarily escaping the fighting by feeling into Russia.

Obviously we should be sceptical of what Russia says about this, but this is not the same number as the number of children abducted - not even Ukraine alleges it to be this high.

The number of children abducted and forcibly deported was officially reported by Kyev to be 19,000 to 20,000 at the time of the above claim based on the data (nearly 30,000 now). The real number is almost certainly higher - many Ukranian officials believe the actual amount is higher, with one saying it may be into the ‘hundreds of thousands’. A US report in 2022 estimates that Russia has “interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported… 260,000 children, from their homes to Russia”

Even if we take only the low amount that can be fairly positively stated as abductions, that’s nearly 30,000 children. Various reports have shown some of these children being given new Russian identities and false birth certificates, and being put up for adoption in Russia. Some have testified to being indoctrinated and shown pro-Kremlin propaganda.

This broadly constitutes Cultural Genocide - whether it technically is or not is for academics to argue over, because the legal definition of genocide is complicated and so much is unkown.

Whether or not you want to call it a Genocide, it is undeniably a War Crime. The ICC has issued arrest warrents for Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova over this.