Dan Bray

Opinions mine. Wit, insight and humour usually someone else's.

[Solo Monk @JJKALE2]

Segal:

I have no part in the decision making of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Shoebridge:

Do you have an academic specialist on loan from the ECAJ? Do you have a staff member funded by the ECAJ in your office?

Segal: YES

DS: How did they turn up in your office?

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

Belatedly, a government guidance document upholds the Supreme Court ruling that a woman is – guess what? – a woman. 70 MPs have signed a rearguard motion opposing it. Presumably they think a man is a woman if he says he is. Among them is Layla Moran, for whom I used to vote.

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

Around 1,950 years ago in Pompeii, a weaver named Successus fell in love with a barmaid named Iris.

She did not love him back.

We know this because his rival, a man named Severus, decided to humiliate him publicly. He grabbed something sharp and carved this into a wall for the whole city to read:

"Successus the weaver loves the innkeeper's slave girl named Iris. She does not care about him at all. But he begs her to have pity on him. His rival wrote this. Goodbye."

Imagine walking to work and seeing that with your name on it.

Successus found it. And instead of letting it go, he carved his reply directly underneath:

"Envious one, why do you get in the way? Yield to a man who is better looking and being treated very unfairly."

Severus came back one more time to end it:

"I have spoken. I have written. You love Iris, but she does not love you."

Then, in 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted and buried the wall, the tavern, and the entire argument under 20 feet of ash. The thread was frozen mid-beef for almost two millennia until archaeologists dug it up and translated it.

We will never know who got the girl. We do not even know if any of the three survived.

Pompeii has over 11,000 of these inscriptions. Bar reviews. Bragging. Bad poetry. A bakery wall that says "Welcome, hungry people." Two guys fighting over a girl in the comments.

The technology changes. We do not.

[Drew Hutton @DrewHutton45645]

I emailed the Queensland Greens today to resign from the party I founded. I’m very sad about this as the Greens was a major part of my life’s work. However, their support for gender extremism, their rejection of freedom of speech and their refusal to see the world in any other terms than the narrow class bubble they are in meant I had little choice.

I shall be looking to support progressive community independents who are good on the environment and are committed to changing the Sex Discrimination Act and banning puberty blockers.

More on this soon.

[Dan Bray @DanJBray]

@IAPonomarenko

[Marcus d’Osint 🎒🕊️ @WarFrontIntel]

The onion never misses. 😂

[Saint Javelin @saintjavelin]

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

[Dan Bray @DanJBray]

@lowlandsapien

[Regina Bauer 🇪🇪🇺🇦 @petite_michelle]

People keep asking what the Soviet occupation actually cost the Baltic states. You don't have to imagine it. There's a control group, and it's sitting right across the gulf.
In 1938 — the last full year before the war — Estonia and Finland had essentially the same GDP per capita. Two small nations, same sea, neighboring languages, the same starting line. By some rankings Estonia was even slightly ahead. Heritage FoundationX
Then history split in two.
Finland fought the Winter War and kept its independence. Estonia was occupied, annexed, and folded into a planned economy. Same decade, opposite roads.
Fifty years later:
🇫🇮 Finland — ~$24,000 per person (1992)
🇪🇪 Estonia — ~$2,800
An eightfold gap — from an identical starting point. Not because Finns worked harder. Not because Estonians were less capable. One country was free to build. The other was told what to build, for whom, and at what loss.
The wages say it even more cleanly: in 1938 Estonian purchasing power was just 4% below Finland's; by 1988 it was 42% below. That cliff is the occupation, drawn in numbers.
And here's the part that ends the argument. Set free for a single generation, Estonia has already clawed back to roughly four-fifths of Finnish income. A gap that took 50 years to open is closing in 30. That's the proof it was never about us — it was the system imposed on us.
There's a cost that never shows up in GDP, either. No occupation means no cattle cars to Siberia. No murdered and exiled intelligentsia. No decades of settlers moved in to outnumber the natives — which means the very "Russian-speaking minority" Moscow is now parading before the ICJ wouldn't exist at anything like that scale. The grievance Russia is litigating is one it manufactured itself.
So no — we don't wonder what we lost. We can see it from the ferry.
And free at last, it's what we're finally becoming again. 🇪🇪🇱🇻🇱🇹

[Dan Bray @DanJBray]

@lowlandsapien I think I've ranted to you before about Melbourne's water supply running down to 26% in the millennium drought in 2007? Population was 3.7m then. It's 5.4m now.

It feels like the same climate action people (of which I'm one) are also often pro high immigration.

[Dan Bray @DanJBray]

@felocie33177 @AlexLuck9

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel planted explosives in a school for disabled children at dawn today in South Lebanon and blew it up.

Not a military target.

A school for disabled children — perhaps the only one in the country.

In what universe is this considered “self-defense”?

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

Due to the Australian sex discrimination commissioners interpretation of the law women are having to:

• Go to the high court to reestablish that we are still included in the legislation that was created specifically for us
• Lesbians have to go to a tribunal for a second time to reestablish that heterosexual men are not lesbians
• A woman is being dragged through a state tribunal for saying that men who claim to be women cannot breastfeed
• Women are losing both employment & volunteer positions for asserting the *fact* that men are not women
• A woman is appealing a $95,000 fine for using publicly available information to inform people that there are men in women’s sport
• Women are being threatened with punishment if they don’t compete with the men in sport
• School aged girls are not drinking water at school - or not attending at all for the week of their period - so they don’t have to use unisex bathrooms
• Women currently & formally in prison are revealing the sexual assaults they have experienced due to men who claim to be women locked in cells with them

The current *interpretation* of Australia’s sex discrimination act - accepted by the full federal court for reasons known only to them - is not creating less discrimination. In fact, it’s creating much more. Interestingly, it’s simultaneously proving that everyone knows exactly who the women & girls actually are, because we’re the ones being punished.

Gender ideology has failed and is being rejected in almost every other country it attempted to thrive within. It has brought down the careers of many politicians who didn’t have the metaphorical balls to acknowledge reality and fix the problem. To think that Australian is any different is as ignorant as it is insane.

This is not a “culture war”, @AlboMP. It’s a war on women & girls.

[Alex Luck @AlexLuck9]

"Mr Marles told the ABC in Singapore that there were "no changes" to the AUKUS deal, and it was "the same arrangement it has always been"..."

Look, I dont mean to be daft, but the arrangement changing is the entire point of this present reporting. 😉

https://t.co/PL3jxU0D96

[Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien]

The Ukrainian decision to double down on drone warfare, from the battlefield, to mid range and long range strike, and not to draft all of its young men to make infantry, will be seen by historians as one of the most important decisions in 19th-21st century warfare.

[Dan Bray @DanJBray]

@felocie33177 @AlexLuck9 Everything OK?

[Women's Voices Australia @womensvoicesau]

Not sure I could love Germaine Greer any more than I do. Everytime I watch this clip 💜💜 her a little more. For all the sex denialists this is the original critique of “gender”. Take note: Women are a sex class.

[Dan Bray @DanJBray]

@PhillipsPOBrien "Do not listen to the western press (on Ukrainian)" and "The US president is thoroughly corrupt," were the preserve of weirdo conspiracy types a few short years ago - now clear statements of fact from erudite academic and author.

I marvel at Ukraine and despair for the US.

[Dan Bray @DanJBray]

@felocie33177 @AlexLuck9 Asking a question is a request for information.

[Masih Alinejad 🏳️ @AlinejadMasih]

و حالا همان مردان ایرانیِ حامی الهان عمر، زن محجبه‌ی کنگره آمریکا، دوباره به من حمله می‌کنند که چرا از @AOC، یکی دیگر از نمایندگان کنگره، انتقاد کرده‌ام. چرا از شهردار مسلمانی که یک کلمه در مورد قتل‌هام ایرانیان زیر سایه حکومت اسلامی حرف نزد انتقاد کردم.

از این مردانی که ناگهان خود را مدافع فمینیست‌های غربی و ترویج اسلام‌گرایی در غرب معرفی می‌کنند، نهراسیم.

آن‌ها سال‌هاست زنان غربی را پیشرو، آگاه و شایسته‌ی دفاع می‌دانند، اما وقتی نوبت به زنان ایرانی می‌رسد که از تجربه‌ی زیسته‌ی خود زیر قوانین تبعیض‌آمیز و واپسگرای شریعت سخن می‌گویند و ریاکاری برخی سیاستمداران و فعالان غربی را به چالش می‌کشند، ناگهان خشمگین می‌شوند و‌ مثل ماموران گشت ارشاد خودشان را پرتاپ می‌کنند وسط بحث که هیسسسس! آبروی ایران را نبرید!

همان مردانی که اگر از آنها بپرسیم چرا استادیوم‌های ایران باید چهل سال با حضور مردانی چون شما پر باشد و زنان پشت در بمانند، ناراحت می‌شوند.

همان مردان خواننده که اگر بپرسیم چرا مردان ایرانی بدون حضور زنان روی صحنه می‌روند و از آزادی و برابری سخنرانی می‌کنند، به قبایشان برمی‌خورد.

همان مردانی که اگر بپرسیم چرا حاضر نیستند سینما را به خاطر حذف زنان سینماگری که حجاب از سر برداشتند بایکوت کنند، رگ گردن‌شان متورم می‌شود… حامیان خجالتی جمهوری اسلامی نباشید!
از این دسته مردان ایرانی که از زنان حمایت می‌کنند؛ تا زمانی که آن زنان از تجربه‌ی خودشان درباره‌ی قوانین اسلام حرف نزنند و به فمنیست‌های غربی مورد علاقه‌شان نگویند دست از عادی سازی قوانین شریعت بردارید.

بله این رسما حمایت از حکومت اسلامی است که سالها دهان زنانی چون مرا بست، کمپین‌های ضد حجاب و دوربین ما اسلحه ما را هم باعث دوقطبی سازی جامعه معرفی می‌کرد، زهی خیال باطل اگر فکر کنید با هیاهو و حمله‌های شما، زنان ایرانی چشم و دهان‌شان را به روی سکوت این سیاستمداران ریاکار در برابر قتل‌عام مردم زیر سایه حکومت اسلامی و عادی‌سازی قوانین شریعت می‌بندند!