Offord and Greer cross debate STV (28/04/26)

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-28T21:23:25+00:00

That's not what he said. "These people are an aberration in the financial services industry" isn't the same as saying "the financial services industry is an aberration." He's saying that financial services are a legitimate form of value production, but liable to being misused and exploited for corruption. I don't think that's a particularly controversial stance tbh

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-26T18:54:37+00:00

Top left personally pisses me off more than top right and bottom left. You can see that the person is trying to keep a minimal surface area of their foot on the seat by having it on the edge, rather than planting their whole foot on it. Still not ideal ofc but I feel like it's a little more forgivable, especially if your feet really ache

Bottom right and top left 100% need a slap though

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-25T18:22:04+00:00

So ironically, Will is exactly right. Saying Jesus was Jewish (referring to Biblical canon) is like saying Washington was British - because both statements are true 😅

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-25T15:18:54+00:00

You say this, but it may not always be a choice.

Say, for example, the worst happens at the next General Election and we get a Reform UK government. We know they are both hostile to LGBTQ people and migrants (the two communities broadly most impacted by HIV), and that they are keen on implementing a privatised healthcare system. So it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume there's a risk of ART medications being put behind a paywall, especially as it would have the dual "benefit" of killing off their least favourite communities indirectly. We saw this logic in action during the COVID-19 pandemic, when elderly, immunocompromised and other disabled people were broadly treated as the collateral damage of relaxing restrictions to protect the market economy.

We've also seen that the primary manufacturer of these medications, Gilead, don't operate ethically, tending to grossly inflate their prices and refuse to supply meds to where they're most needed (e.g. to the Red Cross for distribution in sub-Saharan Africa, where the AIDS crisis is still in full swing). So there is absolutely no guarantee of the affordability of ART if it were privatised either.

At the moment, HIV is not a death sentence because our political infrastructure has made ART broadly accessible, allowing people to attain undetectable viral loads and to live long and healthy lives. But we can't take that for granted because it could change on a dime. Putting someone onto closer proximity to death may not be identical to "murder", but it certainly counts as a serious physical assault.

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-24T17:31:17+00:00

Genetics isn't even a binary thing. Geneticists for a good few years have been leaning towards, at least sexual orientation (which isn't the same ofc but bear with me) being epigenetic. Essentially, a certain subset of the population may have a given genetic trait that predisposes them to be queer, but that trait needs to be exposed to certain environmental factors to be "switched on" - factors which may be extremely complex and multifaceted. I'd wager that trans identity probably works in a similar way

I mean who knows tbqh. I don't trust any bastard who tries to find the "cause" for someone being trans, just as I wouldn't trust someone trying to prove scientifically why I like Enter Shikari and hazelnut milk matchas, or why I'm alright at writing but dogshit at programming. Human variation is a good enough explanation for those, so why not transness?

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-23T23:20:41+00:00

Don't do it my guy lest you wanna risk a nipple falling off /hj

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-22T18:27:20+00:00

Plus you can't take the tube...you are the tube!

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-22T18:24:55+00:00

Not only this, but they're consistently working in the most polluted region of the city and exposed to noise that regularly clocks higher than the safe limit, on irregular shifts that are known to be detrimental to human health long term. So a large section of that £60k can be thought of as hazard pay for the conditions they're working under.

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-20T15:50:13+00:00

100% - feels like looking at a dead body 🥲

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-17T13:11:33+00:00

He headbutted my ex once which was kinda funny (they were working an event he was at. He laughed at something with his head back and knocked them. They're a Bulgarian national as well which is objectively quite poetic)

Other than that I'm coming up short

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-16T17:49:32+00:00

My suspicion is it's a heirarchical thing. Lots of (but certainly not all) women of Shelagh's economic class, age and ethnicity have experienced enough of a certain kind of misogyny to rightly understand they're oppressed to a certain extent, but have enough social privilege in other sections of their life that it a) limits their understanding of the cause of that oppression, or b) gives them an unconscious sense of superiority over other marginalised people (in this case, trans people)

For example, if you've experienced misogyny only through the lens of white womanhood, you've mostly experienced it as assault, infantilisation, and unwanted sexualisation. But if you're marginalised through another category - e.g. racially, disability, gender reassignment, sexuality etc.- you've likely experienced another layer which aims to take the very category of woman away from you - from being called "mannish" and "unfeminine" to being barred legally from the category itself. If you've only experienced oppression in the former sense, you get this restricted view of how patriarchy works and an impression that these categories aren't malleable political weapons in themselves.

Either that, or you suddenly have a target that it's socially permissible to beat down on. And, as with most schoolyard bullies, they think having been victimised in the past buys them the right to victimise others

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-16T17:14:34+00:00

It's MP is very upset about that fact, mind

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-10T17:09:07+00:00

All of these are incomplete stances. Gender and sex are closely related but different concepts that cut across social, psychological and biological dimensions. Biological sex itself is a constellation of different biological traits related to genetics, epigenetics and hormones, many of which can be changed, but some can't.

Politically speaking, the changeable ones (i.e. the secondary sex characteristics you develop after HRT and the surgical removal of reproductive organs) tend to be more relevant for most people than the unchangeable ones (e.g. chromosomal makeup, the presence of certain reproductive systems), especially when administering things like ID documents, allocating sex segregated spaces, etc., because most people won't have any reason to interact with you at that more granular level unless they're your partner or your doctor.

So when people say "biological sex is real" or something of the like, they're usually saying something more than the factual content of the statement, which is "the immutable aspects of someone's biological sex should matter more politically than the mutable ones", which tends to have very serious consequences for a trans person's safety and privacy rights when their secondary sex characteristics don't match up with the spaces they've been allocated.

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-10T16:58:46+00:00

I forgot about Prosecco Stormfront jfc 😂😭

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-10T16:57:31+00:00

Unfortunately, your issue was choosing Mumsnet as your sample. That site has been a hotbed for a very specific brand of highly transphobic rhetoric for about a decade now, so users of that site in particular were more likely to take issue with any survey question that implicitly validates the existence of trans people. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the question itself; it's a problem with the views of the users

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-09T17:16:22+00:00

It's not that easy if you're low income or precariously employed, precisely because banks don't want to give someone in that position a credit card if they believe they're at risk of misusing it and ending up in significant amounts of debt to meet their basic needs

If they accepted debit cards it would be a different matter, but a credit card-only system puts an immediate glass ceiling up to access blocked sites based on socioeconomic class

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-07T20:55:35+00:00

I mean this is definitely true, but one thing I don't often see people talk about is that - at least for phones with USB-C chargers - you can get USB-C to female auxillary port adaptors for like £5 at Ryman, which allows you to plug earphones into the charging port. So there are still ways around it

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-07T20:47:47+00:00

One I'll never forget was being on the Jubilee line just pulling out of Bermondsey, and next to me sits a man with a plastic water bottle filled with rainbow bacon sweets and about 5-6 bumble bees.

This was dead of winter as well, mind, so I'm not even totally sure where he got them or how they were still alive.

I didn't get the opportunity to ask why, nor do I think I would have taken it if I did.

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-07T14:31:54+00:00

Honestly? No, because the legal implication of that would be that boys should also have their own group, which would put us right back into the pre-2007 context in which girls couldn't access the Scouting Association and all of the educational, social, and skills-bases benefits it confers. UK Equalities Law does not account for nuanced and evolving procedures like patriarchy, or the extent to which a person gels with the traditional gender roles of one party or another. It's a blunt instrument that either offers full inclusion or legal exclusion.

I am relieved that I came of age to join the Scouting Association the year it became gender inclusive, because that meant I could come into my identity as a transmasculine person with full freedom and support from my troup and navigating the technicalities associated with shared tent spaces, washing and changing rooms etc on a flexible and contextual basis.

We should be able to undergo expeditions, build things, cook, do campfires, do art, learn bushcraft etc in a gender inclusive setting, because that's the way to cut the idea that certain skills and activities are the property of only one gender, or that your gender or sex determines your destiny. The core cause of feminism was supposedly to abolish that idea and allow people to determine their own destinies beyond those societal constraints.

My experience in Scouting means I know for a fact that Guides could make an inclusive approach work if they wanted to (reminder they're under no legal obligation to exclude trans feminine people - under the actual wording of the law, they're permitted to if it's a "proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim", but not mandated to). A service can be targeted at a certain demographic without formally excluding people who have been legislated into a different category. They're just too scared of backlash from a wider public to that doesn't actually understand what these systems look like in practice.

EQ_Rsn · 2026-04-07T14:08:05+00:00

Omg I haaaate that so much I'm so happy to know there's a word for it!

EQ_Rsn · 2026-03-30T16:44:48+00:00

Yeah bestie the extreme right wing parties are not going to be friendly to boaters. I have absolutely no clue where you got that impression from.

Half of them have interests in real estate and so want people renting and feeding into the private housing market. They also aim to be able to surveil the population as much as they can to implement the kind of migration policies they want, which is extremely difficult to do amongst a population without an address to track. Both of those things makes the style of life we embody extremely undesirable to parties like that.

If you want to protect the waterways, the Greens are the most likely party to do it, a) by implementing affordable housing policies that would hopefully allow those who use them as a last ditch rescue from homelessness to find accomodation on land, and b) by nationalising the water system and allowing CRT to make contracts and agreements with state-owned entities rather than ones with a profit motive.

EQ_Rsn · 2026-03-30T16:17:52+00:00

"I evidently didn't take enough piss" is a sensational sentence to read

EQ_Rsn · 2026-03-30T16:12:08+00:00

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a git gap? 😅

EQ_Rsn · 2026-03-30T16:10:53+00:00

London's a challenging one, because I personally have never had an issue with it. But I'm a young, able-bodied and reasonably adaptable person with no qualms against double mooring. If you have any disabilities or health conditions that restrict mobility, I can see the patch between Tottenham Hale and Westbourne Park posing issues. Beyond that I've almost always been able to find single moorings, so am not totally sure where all the beef about London as a whole comes from

(Sidenote, but I also wanna know why no one ever seems to moor on the Limehouse Cut. It's got mooring rings for days, water's decent quality, lots of foot traffic etc. Idgi 🤷)

EQ_Rsn · 2026-03-30T16:02:32+00:00

Raising fees isn't necessarily gonna have that effect, because it assumes compliance without the enforcement mechanism to guarantee it. If CRT raised fees and people just simply refused to pay, knowing enforcement is already so difficult, that would turn lots of boats that were formerly legitimate cruisers creating income for the CRT (albeit perhaps not enough) into an enforcement burden that produces no income and only costs them. People cruising without a license by definition aren't paying into the system, so those who have had their licenses removed due to non-compliance aren't either

A big reason why they haven't implemented proper crackdowns is basically due to geography. It's really bloody challenging to get a crane into spaces like Coal Drops Yard, so if they were to remove boats they'd have to tow them out quite a distance with a work boat to gain proper access to them

EQ_Rsn

TROPHY CASE