Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
David Andress Profile picture
David Andress
@ProfDaveAndress
Historian of revolution, pessimistic anarchist. Nobody else wants these views, trust me. 'His real face is a hat' - Fern Riddell.
Jun 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Once again it must be spelled out, the Covid death-toll in Japan - a densely-populated island nation with an ageing population - is SIX TIMES LOWER, per capita, than in Tory Britain. ImageImage Japan has literally twice the population of the UK; it is literally the world's oldest national population.

They have had literally one-third the number of Covid deaths as the UK.

Everything about this is a choice.
Jun 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is a very interesting chart. It highlights the complexity of deciding what a "high" or "low" price for something is, in very different national cultures of consumption, competition and subsidy.
bbc.co.uk/news/business-… Image Why should laundry detergent cost more than THREE TIMES more in France than Spain, right next door, inside the Single Market?

There will be reasons. They will be fascinating. Will we learn them?
Jun 5, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
On this day in 1944, General Eisenhower wrote this scribbled text, taking full, personal responsibility for the failure of the D-Day landings. He edited it specifically to underline that everything had been his decision.

He was so stressed-out he put the wrong month. Image Transcribed in the image below:
Jun 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Vomit-inducing garbage being produced by the scum at the Torygraph today, Vile drivel. They would have hung us all out to die. Image Lockdown started on 23 March, when daily deaths had yet to reach 100. It was ALREADY too late to save many. Daily deaths peaked a month later at over 1200.

Can you even BEGIN TO IMAGINE how out-of-control this curve would have been without lockdown? Image
Jun 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Across thirty countries, a two-thirds majority see transgender people as suffering “a great deal” of discrimination. Image The UK is in line with the international average of three-quarters of people seeing transgender rights as in need of protection. Image
Jun 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Oh my GOD they literally faffed around with this during the original build for over a YEAR, decided it was too expensive, and now...

navalnews.com/event-news/cne… They spent £100,000,000, and then changed their minds...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Eli… Image
Jun 3, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Every time someone tries to make a distinction between 'good' gays and 'bad' transes, they're siding with people who are, in fact, trying to ban being gay as well. Image Right there in black and white:
theguardian.com/us-news/2023/a…
Jun 2, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
TFW you have to make a detailed declaration of political (non-)faith before being allowed to criticise extreme right-wing views, and it doesn't matter because they'll call you a woke cultural Marxist anyway. Image I mean, BOOM, right? Image
Jun 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Did you know, for the whole of modern history, the only period when people were barred from changing their sex in English law was between 1970 and 1999?

Until April Ashley's husband sued to annul their marriage, she had been free to live as a woman.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Ash… In 2012, the Cameron government gave April Ashley an MBE, for services to transgender equality.

In 2021, the Johnson government gave Kathleen Stock an OBE, for the exact opposite. Image
Jun 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What KS and her supporters claim is that trans people can of course have rights, but they can’t have the right to be the thing they say they are.

But that is saying they can’t exist, as what they are. Because you refuse to believe what they are is real. And below that original tweet, there is a string of people doing literally, exactly that, and thinking they can be proud of the fact they’ve refuted the claim they don’t want trans people to exist. But they are, in fact, saying they don’t want trans people to exist, right there.
May 31, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
What these fascists are trying here is an explicitly antitrans attack. A concerted extreme-right effort to promote the idea that anyone involved in breaching gender norms is automatically a dangerous pervert.

In the USA this has produced bomb and gun threats. Arizona: advocate.com/arizona/drag-q…
Kentucky: eu.courier-journal.com/story/news/202…
Indiana: wibc.com/148262/bomb-th…
Ohio: vice.com/en/article/7kx…
May 31, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The worst thing about the antitrans movement probably isn't that something overtly supported by Donald Trump, umpteen rightwing-extremist US state legislatures, every hard-right party in Europe, & a wide range of basic white people ALSO preens itself as a voice of social justice. But it does feel like the worst thing sometimes.

Like, look at your friends. Look at who tweets in your support. Look at who's passing actual antitrans laws. Look who comes to protest drag-queen story-hour. Just look, FFS. Be honest about who they are.
May 31, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
One of the things that people who've never thought beyond common sense find hard to grasp is that their "common sense" was quite often "derided nonsense" not very long ago, and what they see as derided nonsense now may soon be common sense. Look at this almost perfect straight-line shift in US opinion on gay marriage, for example. And that's in less than 30 years. Image
May 31, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Absolute explosion of stone racism here as people withdraw their support from an increasingly silly film franchise on the basis that a British superspy with a machine-gun-armed Aston Martin just isn't realistic unless he's white...

twitter.com/search?q=%22Ja… The Bond franchise, for me, had two peaks - late Connery/early Moore, and early Brosnan. At both points, all involved remembered that what they were doing was fundamentally silly and meaningless. Trying to make James Bond represent something "serious" is absurd. But here we are.
May 31, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Suppose being trans isn't actually that different from being lesbian, in its social, political and legal consequences... what a thought... In my lifetime, lesbians were *widely* regarded as dangerously predatory, and a threat to *normal* women, especially young girls...

Here's the Guardian, in 2015, complaining about how much it's STILL a trope...
theguardian.com/film/filmblog/…
May 31, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
To engage in disruptive protest in the UK today, knowing that you put your own body on the line not just against potential police violence, but vigilante attack, and that you put your whole person in the firing-line of vile denigratory abuse, is an act of pure virtuous courage. At one level, I can understand the people who hurl insults at those who disrupt "normal life", but at a deeper level, I sincerely wish they could see beyond their knee-jerk reactions to understand that "normal life" is an illusion.
May 30, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Catharine A. Mackinnon, the godmother of radical, anti-porn feminism, says "Fuck terfs"...

signsjournal.org/exploring-tran…

Outstanding. Image Fire and brimstone raining down on antitrans inanities from a great height. Truly remarkable. Let anyone dare challenge her credentials. ImageImage
May 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Let's return to the vacuous fatuity of KS just throwing out this "extra changing rooms for all" suggestion.

Because of course it's only meaningful if trans women ARE actually barred from the women's space. If every shop changing room DOES have gender-police on the door. So when she plays nice with the fluffy-sounding "a range of spaces for everyone", it's only meaningful, in her own terms of THERE BEING SOMETHING WRONG WITH TRANS WOMEN BEING IN WOMEN'S SPACES, if those trans women are forcibly barred from those spaces.
May 30, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Nobody with any power has tried to stop KS speaking. People have objected to it, because her claims are objectionable. People will protest, because protest is (still, barely) their democratic right.

And what's really happening will remain buried: bbc.co.uk/news/education… Image Once again, people with MASSIVE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PLATFORMS are claiming persecution because a vilified minority is asking them to stop vilifying them.
May 30, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
An absolute masterclass in using supposed "cancellation" [and her Ox Union date is going ahead, it's going ahead!] to get yourself, yet again, absolutely uncritically platformed in the national media to say any damn thing you please. Image A handful of individual edge-cases are not the real problem with women's prisons. Systemic violence, neglect and self-harm are the real problem with women's prisons.

derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-new…
May 30, 2023 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Trans people and their friends & allies have every right to be absolutely, publicly, furious about this.

Cohen was a prominent establishment voice supporting antitrans agitation EVEN WHILE abusing women; and the antitrans movement embraced and defended him. The antitrans movement parades itself - falsely, of course - as the guardians of moral and material truth, right up to the moment one of their mates is exposed as a serial groper of young women...