There’s a kind of discomfort that comes from watching a public figure be right about an issue you care about while being dead wrong about something else you care about. It happened this week with pop icon Boy George when he walked away from his longtime record label rather than pull “We Will Dance Again,” a song he made for the young people murdered, raped, and kidnapped at the Nova Festival.
Standing up when it costs you something is rare. He’s now getting the treatment that’s become depressingly familiar since October 7th — the same treatment people got for saying “all lives matter” after George Floyd — a coordinated campaign to punish someone for refusing to disavow solidarity with Israelis and Jews.
On this I support him. But where I part company with him is his public fight with J.K. Rowling over women-only spaces. I agree totally with her common-sense take on the need to protect female-only spaces from trans identifying men.
Many people have trained themselves to treat public figures as bundles that come fully assembled: agree with one part, you’re implicitly endorsing the whole package; object to another part, you’re obligated to tear the rest down too. That’s not principle, it’s just intellectual laziness.
I’ll take the agreement where I can get it. On Israel, he’s earned it. On women’s spaces, he’s not there yet — maybe will never be. Both things are true, and neither one needs to apologize for the other.
An extremely formative moment for me was about ten years ago when I was in Papua New Guinea for work and I was chatting to an Australian official about trade and economic development there and he very straightforwardly told me that, look, we invest a lot and we try, but at the end of the day, there's a guy who runs the port, and he has this uncle who is a fisherman, and you can schedule some freight to arrive at the port, but if the uncle shows up and decides he needs the port berth for his fishing boat, the guy who runs the port will let him have it and cancel the freight because that's just how it is.
the conspiracy theory where jews are secretly plotting to replace white people with the most antisemitic cultural group in the entire world has to be the dumbest shit i've heard in my life
Caitlin Clark went off 🔥 tonight in front of an angry crowd in Portland‼️
Tons of Trans activists showed up to boo the Indiana Fever after Caitlin’s teammate Sophie Cunningham made a comment about not wanting men competing in women’s sports.
And as you can see Caitlin was also being fouled all night as usual as the refs completely ignored it.
Caitlin didn’t let that stop her though.
She responded with another historical performance:
26 points.
10 rebounds.
10 assists.
2 steals.
1 block.
This is her fourth career triple double tying Sabrina Ionescu for third most triple doubles in league history.
In 2014 we published the first large-scale study of suicidality in autism, subsequently widely replicated, revealing that 1 in 4 autistic people have planned or attempted suicide. That’s why I’m very concerned about the impact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autistic. He has been accused of plagiarism and he was cleared of any academic misconduct following a rigorous investigation by Liverpool John Moores University. And yet he continues to be systematically discredited over every detail of his life, daily. We should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards. However, I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues. This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safe-guarding issues. It’s time to stop.
.@AmnestyUK Your Friday afternoon “apology” — for the grotesque Amnesty report attacking female rape victims for wanting a women-only crisis center — is a textbook exercise in damage control, which you timed to vanish into the weekend news vacuum. That you chose not to publish this apology on your social media channels is a telling indication of the importance you attach to it.
You claim the report “should never have been published” and that “full responsibility for this error rests with Amnesty International UK.” But then you immediately dilute it: the briefing was taken down “as soon as management were notified of its existence.” So leadership only learned of a major public report after it was already live? That is not an explanation. It is rather an indictment of total managerial failure and a culture that allowed ideological activists to weaponize Amnesty’s name without basic oversight.
You still cannot bring yourselves to speak plainly. “Whilst we do not share the views of all these organisations…” You smeared Beira’s Place — a women-only sexual violence support service founded by JK Rowling for female survivors of male violence — as part of an “anti-rights” movement. You listed For Women Scotland, Sex Matters, LGB Alliance and dozens of grassroots women’s and same-sex rights groups alongside anti-abortion organizations, then called for scrutiny of their funding and status.
That is not a “labelling” error. It is a deliberate attempt to delegitimize sex-based rights after the Supreme Court ruled that “woman” means biological sex.
JK Rowling was right: You attacked female rape victims for wanting male-free spaces and treated belief in biological reality as a human-rights threat.
As reported in The Times, the granddaughter of Amnesty co-founder Seán MacBride, Iseult White, said that your organization now acts like the authoritarian regimes you once exposed, and that she wouldn't give you a penny. https://t.co/VxVcH2qPzc
Your pledges about an “ongoing internal investigation” plus a self-commissioned “independent external review” do not constitute accountability. The problem with your organization is not about one rogue briefing. It is deep-rooted institutional capture, which treats protected gender-critical belief and single-sex provision as inherently suspect.
Most important of all: there must be real leadership consequences. Those who allowed this blacklist to be produced and published, and those who failed in their duty of oversight, cannot simply continue as before. This includes the ultimate responsibility of Secretary General Agnès Callamard, who leads the organization globally and oversees its national sections. So far she has chosen silence and evaded any resposibility. Resignations, or at the very least clear accountability at the highest levels, are required. Anything less is more of the same mealy-mouthed evasion, process without principle, regret without responsibility.
No organization that enjoys the prestige and vast multi-million dollar resources of Amnesty can blacklist a women’s rape crisis center and then pretend the problem was merely procedural. This was the predictable outcome of an institutional culture that has inverted the meaning of human rights. Until that culture and the ideology behind it are confronted and changed, Amnesty’s claim to moral authority stands exposed as a pretense.
Look at the guy behind Trump the moment he suddenly raises his head from the nap he was taking at Lindsey Graham's funeral.
What do you think happened that moment? 😳
If Mamdani would like me, a white New Yorker who never owned slaves, to pay a black New Yorker who never was a slave, then I propose:
Every Muslim in NYC starting with Mamdani, should pay us for 9/11.
Please explain why the latter makes no sense but the former does.