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Feminist Witchcraft Free-For-All Pronouns Or Else

Incompatible Pretending

June 3, 2025 50 Comments

Mr Muldoon steers us to a tale of colliding make-believe:

Witch ‘thrown off druid training course’ in trans row.

A very modern headline, I think you’ll agree.

A practising witch claims she was thrown off a druid training course over accusations by a member of the UK Pagan Federation that she was “transphobic” in a row about women’s rights.

They have training courses, you know, and websites, and a federation. We’re all learning things today.

Angela Howard said she became involved with paganism and joined the British Druid Order (BDO) in 2020 to find “spiritual healing” after being sexually assaulted. In 2023, she was “knighted” as a “warrior princess” at Stonehenge and began training as a student “Bard” – a division of modern druidry – defined as storytellers, poets, musicians, historians, artists and performers.

Ms Howard, it turns out, is a “second-generation witch,” following in the mystical footsteps of her mother, “a high priestess” who “ran a coven in the 1980s.”

However, Howard said the solace she sought in druidry and paganism was shattered when she was banned in April from continuing her training because of her support of the exclusion of trans women – males who identify as female – from single-sex spaces for women.

A very modern heresy. Resulting in a revoking of membership and denial of access to witchcraft course materials.

The dispute began, she said, three days after the landmark Supreme Court judgment that ruled the definition of a woman under equality laws related to biological sex, rather than “certificated gender” acquired by trans people.

The Pagan Federation, however, issued a statement insisting that the womanliness of cross-dressing men is obvious, unassailable and “not up for debate”:

Trans women are women, trans men are men, and all non-binary genders are valid.

Validity for everyone. Just tilt your head and squint. Apparently, we’re to be told what reality is by people who think they’re witches.

Howard said she responded to this statement by commenting that there were situations in which women needed single-sex spaces, such as changing rooms, women’s refuges and prisons. She illustrated the point by citing her own experience of being sexually assaulted by a trans person, a man who identified as a woman.

Ah, that Thing That Never Happens.

Howard claimed that her comments were deleted and said that she was blocked from viewing the contents of the Facebook page, which you have to be a member to access.

As these are terribly modern, immensely caring witches, Ms Howard was banned from the organisation’s Facebook page and from the website of the British Druid Order on grounds of being “unequivocally transphobic.” Thereby denying Ms Howard access to the arcane knowledge of “seers and healers,” along with the opportunity to purchase oracle cards, audio recordings of spells and invocations, and “hymns to the divine feminine.” Oh, and guides to coping with stress by wrapping a thick blanket around your head.

No more “walking between worlds,” alas.

At which point, readers may wish to ponder the implied rules of pretending, the hierarchy of make-believe, in which some people pretending to be something that they aren’t are deemed of much greater importance than other people pretending to be something that they aren’t. A world in which pretending one thing now seems to mean that all pretences, of any kind, must be observed.

Further rumblings on the matter, and photographs of uncanny goings-on, can be found here.

By all means consider this an open thread.

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Reading time: 3 min
Written by: David
Anthropology Free-For-All

The Bullet Holes Were A Clue

June 1, 2025 94 Comments

Lifted from the comments, a bedlamite drama in three parts:

Crazy Lady Arrested For Destroying Tesla pic.twitter.com/P4Iy9dCJhR

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) June 1, 2025

In which, madam talks about her rights. “They shouldn’t even have those cars.”

Part 2:

Part 2 pic.twitter.com/ABKPL9A8vI

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) June 1, 2025

“He’s a piece of work,” she says.

Part 3:

Part 3 pic.twitter.com/zUZyKK2k5g

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) June 1, 2025

“Do you get off by, like, picking up people?” asks the woman who gets off on shooting random people’s cars. “Some people,” she adds, “probably think I’m a hero.” Oh, and madam only attempted to flee because she “had to go to the bathroom.”

Update, via Mr Muldoon in the comments:

A longer video, complete with home security footage of the shooting.

Readers will, I suspect, register the indignant lady’s questionable firearms proficiency.

We have, of course, poked at this particular madness before:

Setting aside for a moment the weird random malice, there’s the more mundane oversight. A Tesla has eight external cameras which record any untoward activity while alerting the owner. The odds of being identified, in high definition, and consequently prosecuted, are fairly high. Yet the people doing the keying and daubing tell us, loudly and quite often, that they’re the smart ones. Our moral and intellectual betters.

It’s not just the conceit that vandalising some random person’s car is a thing one should do as a good person, as an act of righteousness. Bewildering as that is. It’s the idea of doing that to a make of car that’s famed for its ability to record anything that approaches. Which suggests a level of emotional dysregulation, of total impulse control failure, that’s quite hard to relate to.

As so often, one feels obliged to say, “You know this isn’t how well-adjusted adults generally behave, right?”

And that’s before we get to the whole finger-digging-faeces-out-of-your-arse-in-broad-daylight-and-smearing-it-on-some-random-stranger’s-car thing. Lest we forget that glorious feat of radicalism.

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Written by: David
Academia Free-For-All Tree Licking

Peer-Reviewed, You Say

May 20, 2025 117 Comments

And in whatever-the-hell-this-is news:

[The authors] argue that imagining the Earth as a butch dyke lover enables a radically embodied and joyous mode of environmentalist politics…

Because environmentalist politics is all about the joy.

Stephens and Sprinkle situate their bodies in continuity with the Earth in a relationship of queer interdependency… They envision Butch Earth as a switch who invites us into a multitude of embodied, sensual, mindful responses beyond the limits of self-other paradigms.

Ah, those self-other paradigms. And situated bodies. Of course.

[The authors] propose an ethical practice of co-sense, rather than consent, in which humans attune themselves to the Earth via the senses, a process enabled by repeated, communal, non-monogamous marriages to the planet… in a relationship grounded by love and sensuality.

Naturally, the planet is also assigned with novelty pronouns – BE/BER – because, well, because.

Such is the radical heft of the Journal of Lesbian Studies. Where other topics of deep pondering include “lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings,” and “lesbian, non-binary, and trans-dog intimacies.”

Empowered feminist ladies and their erotic entanglements with pets is, you’ll recall, a subject we’ve touched on before.

The latest issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies can be accessed, for a whole thirty days, for a mere £220.

Oh, and should you be intrigued by “ecosexuality,” “grassilingus,” tree-licking, and free-swinging breasts daubed with mud, well, today’s your lucky day.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
Free-For-All Science

Not Entirely Cost Effective

May 15, 2025 53 Comments

In transmutation news:

Scientists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider have successfully transformed lead into gold.

The team behind this discovery… used a unique way to create gold. Instead of crashing lead atoms head-on, they looked at what happens when the atoms just barely miss each other. Researchers explained that when this happens, powerful electromagnetic fields around the atoms can cause them to change into different elements.

The machine can create about 89,000 gold atoms every second,

I know, I know. We’ll be glittering beings, richer than God, with hats and shoes and mattresses all made of gold.

but each atom only exists for a tiny fraction of a second before breaking apart.

Ah. Bugger.

And I suppose there’s the small matter of the electricity bill, running costs, maintenance, staffing, and so forth. Roughly $1 billion a year.

You may resume your dreary, humdrum lives, with mattresses made of foam rubber, springs, and polyester.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
Classic Sentences Free-For-All

And Everything Shall Be Made, Badly, Out Of Wool And Bamboo

May 8, 2025 52 Comments

I paraphrase, of course:

In his 2017 book Prosperity Without Growth, Tim Jackson, an ecological economist at the University of Surrey, called on advanced countries to shift their economies towards local services, such as nursing and teaching, and the development of more rewarding and less resource intensive professions like handicrafts.

I’ll give you a moment to process that one.

“People can flourish without endlessly accumulating more stuff,” Jackson wrote. “Another world is possible.” Yet proposals to abandon economic growth have also been met with scepticism.

Why, yes, I am reading the Guardian. Why do you ask?

Via Mr Worstall.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.