Gender Critical (GC) feminists are essentialists, viewing sex as a binary, rejecting the view that gender identity exists, describing trans healthcare as unnecessary, treating transgender people as members of their gender of birth and demanding their exclusion from the single-sex facilities of their new gender of choice. Recently, this ideology…

So, 8 months on, Ukraine are striking back. Following my last post, in May, Russia spent the summer slowly advancing through the Ukrainian defences in Donbas, grinding through a line of fortifications the Ukrainians had carefully built over the previous 8 years. Russia’s vast superiority in long-range firepower, artillery and…

Today is Victory Day in Russia, a time to remember the past. For the last two months, I wondered what previous conflicts to compare the current war to. For Russia, thus far, one recalls the disastrous Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. Tiny Finland, expected to lose, held back the…

This is Ukraine’s Blitz. Failing to secure a military victory on the ground, Putin is resorting to indiscriminate bombing — much like Hitler, in 1940, resorted to bombing British cities having failed to defeat the RAF. The deliberate bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol on the 10th of March…

The nightmare continues. The unthinkable is becoming real. The unlikely is becoming the expected. The shocking is becoming the everyday. …

It is quite surreal to even be writing this. A major war in Europe, street fighting in a European capital, old history books suddenly the new reality. Instructions for making Molotov cocktails given by train announcers, advice for using them against tanks on Twitter, people in white collar jobs voluntarily…

I had originally vowed stay clear of the gender wars between transgender people and the Gender Criticals. The whole debate seemed niche and irrelevant to the daily lives of most people. It kept cropping up though: an article there, a mention here, a bitter argument somewhere else. People I long…

So Kabul has fallen. The Ghani regime lasted barely three months after its NATO support started to be withdrawn. For comparison, Najibullah’s held out for three years after the Soviets withdrew its forces in 1989, outlasting even the USSR itself. Failure to come close to even that low mark belies…

Trump supporters claim that all the election-related court actions were rejected ‘for standing’, without evidence being considered. This is not true. Whilst standing was a big factor, lack of merit in Trump’s claims was mentioned by many judges as well. So let’s confirm this. My approach was simple: I looked…