We need to bring back intellectual elitism. Sorry, but a virologist will always know more about vaccines than a yoga mommy blogger with a ChatGPT Plus subscription.
"Romping", used to mean sex, implies that an incestuous act done to a child by her father could be considered anything OTHER than rape. There's no context in which it could be ever consensual, and papers that use minimising language are complicit in minimising sexual violence.
I will be pursuing a press complaint against you @DailyMail for this revolting, dangerous, damaging headline.
His poor daughter went to live with him after a difficult life, hoping for love and stability. He got her blind drunk & raped her. She killed herself.
Shame on you.
@CDBiggen@LouiseRawAuthor@DailyMail You're right that this is pretty standard grim language from tabloids, but its important/entirely fair to criticise or challenge when papers use anything other than "rape" to describe rape
@CDBiggen@LouiseRawAuthor@DailyMail "Romping", used to mean sex, implies that an incestuous act done to a child by her father could be considered anything OTHER than rape. There's no context in which it could be ever consensual, and papers that use minimising language are complicit in minimising sexual violence
This headline from @Independent
clearly blames the mother for this tragedy. In fact, the father was in charge of the toddler at the time.
https://t.co/Ys7X8DIgDY
In England, you're allowed to clear about 20 metres of silt and rubbish out of a river on your own. Anything past that needs a permit from the Environment Agency. Paul Powlesland's volunteers cleared a 250-metre stretch of the River Roding with a hired digger, which is why a barrister who hauled out 200 bags of trash is now under criminal investigation.
The Roding runs through east London. Powlesland lives on a boat moored on it, and for years he and a group of volunteers have pulled out shopping trolleys, needles, old appliances, even weapons. Kingfishers, herons and dragonflies came back to water that used to be buried under junk. This one job took 10 days and a digger that cost £1,000 to hire.
The rule that caught him is oddly specific. Under England's water rules, scooping silt off the bottom of a river the agency officially manages counts as a "flood risk activity", and the law treats that the same as building a structure in the water. Do it without a permit and the offence carries up to two years in prison. The agency says it is also looking at waste the volunteers left on the floodplain. Powlesland is an environmental lawyer who has used these exact laws to protect rivers and trees, and a conviction could cost him his licence to practise.
The agency's reasoning isn't unreasonable. Dredging done badly can push flooding onto people downstream and wreck the habitat that protected animals need, which is what the permit is meant to prevent. The 20-metre allowance is there for small jobs. And no decision to prosecute has actually been made.
While investigators were knocking on a volunteer's door within a week of his cleanup, water companies discharged raw sewage into England's rivers and seas for a combined 3.6 million hours in 2024, more than 400 years of spilling packed into a single year. Only 14% of English rivers are in good health. Between 2015 and 2025, the Environment Agency investigated water companies for pollution 11,474 times. Fifty-eight of those ended in a prosecution. For serious pollution over the last five years, the number of water companies actually taken to court and convicted is zero.
So the message comes out backwards. Spend ten days and a thousand pounds making a river cleaner and an officer turns up within the week. Pump sewage into that same river for years and the chance of seeing a courtroom is close to zero.
one of the bleakest facts of reality is that if you are gen z but grew up in fandom (particularly on ao3/tumblr) you will forever have some amount of Millennial Particles and theres genuinely nothing you can do about it
as a lesbian i personally have always felt really uncomfortable being defined as a ‘non-man who loves non-men,’ i think there’s nuance and others really connect to the definition but i’ve always felt really dehumanized when people put it onto me
i like how for a certain set of millennial women “go piss girl” has become an automatic polite social response in the vein of saying “bless you” but for peeing
you couldn’t even write a book called “the very hungry caterpillar” these days. it would have to be something like, “the very cunty caterpillar”. or “the caterpillar who served cunt”. because of woke
i have the rare position that i agree with much radfem theory but accept trans women as women. this means libfems and radfems both hate me and often more actively than they hate men
I honestly hate gay dating standards so much. I haven’t read Deleuze and Guattari. I don’t go to salons all the time. I hardly ever can identify the Lacanian objet petit a. I read Kant and Russell. I prefer concrete notions. I don’t understand the semiotic triangle.
I promise you the no-pfp account calling people with Downs a multitude of slurs is not broadly aligned with the pro-choice/feminist movement. Scroll their account for like 10 seconds and you'll start seeing dog whistles.
A lot of edgelords are crowding the abortion/down syndrome discourse with some pretty disgusting comments towards living disabled people, and a lot of idiots are claiming these edgelords to be pro-choicers. They aren't even commenting on abortion, they're just using the r-slur.
The left wing position on abortion will never have exceptions or caveats no matter how much you twist yourself up trying to make it so. Thank you for your attention to this matter!