iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sure, it’s complicated. You’re just quite unlikely to end up killed by state authority in the UK because of it, with no-one even facing any sort of an inquiry. (Am I wrong to think that’s worse?)

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Whereas in the US, you get killed by ICE for looking at them the wrong way, and they say it was your fault? And that’s better?

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Can we add in, much more unlikely to be made ill by our food? (I value that quite a lot)

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Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Ok, @moderation.bsky.app, put your money where your mouth is, please. You say you adjust your guidelines in response to emerging trends (perhaps the IOC determining women’s sport is for women only is an ‘emerging trend’?) and to our feedback. Please consider this feedback. (NB ‘woman’ is also a pc)

We drafted these guidelines to comply with applicable laws and to do three things:
A. Empower user choice: We strive to make choices on Bluesky that align with your personal preferences and values. To do this, we try to make it easy for people to run their own apps, to choose the algorithms that power their feeds, and to migrate between services.
B. Cultivate a welcoming environment: We want to create a safe and friendly space where users feel welcomed, supported, and enjoy participating.
C. Evolve with feedback: As we evolve, our guidelines and standards will, too. We will regularly review and update these guidelines in response to your feedback, emerging trends, and changing laws.

2. Respect Others
A. Anti-Discrimination: We protect people's fundamental rights by prohibiting identity-based harm and hatred.
i. Do not attack, harass, or incite hatred or discrimination against individuals or groups based on protected characteristics such as age, asylum-seeker/refugee status, caste, disability, disease, ethnicity, gender identity, immigrant status, race, religious affiliation, sex, or sexual orientation.
ii. This includes hate speech, slurs, dehumanizing comparisons, supremacist content, conspiracy theories targeting protected groups, and coordinated harassment campaigns.

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For thousands of years, a solar eclipse has been a prophetic harbinger of a spectacular, epoch-making event. Just saying. #VoteBinface #Clacton

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Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Okay Clacton. Let’s go.

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Kate Birrell @kamabi.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Surely not ALL the blended whisky - just the ones with a really large number of followers on social media?

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A perceptive and challenging article - thanks, Paul heartlandstribune.com/trans-rights...

EHRC Code: Why the Toilet Debate Is a Distraction
The campaign to reduce the Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC Code to a debate about lavatories is not confusion. It is strategy. Behind the toilet door lies the systematic dismantling of women's rights, funded, organised and prosecuted against women who should have been defended years ago.
A conjuring trick requires misdirection. The audience must watch one hand while the other does the work. Keep that principle in mind as you scroll through the endless, repetitive, deliberately narrowed argument about public lavatories, and the entire campaign snaps suddenly into focus.
The toilet is not the argument. The toilet is the frame.
It has been chosen with great care, because it achieves three things at once. It makes women's objections appear mean, petty, almost obsessive. It reduces a broad legal settlement about women's fundamental rights to a single, intimate, emotionally charged doorway. And it places women permanently on the defensive, forever justifying the existence of the boundary rather than those demanding its removal. The question is always
"why are you so obsessed with where people go to the toilet?", never "why is your campaign not about building new facilities for transgender use, but specifically about access to women's existing ones?"

The Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC draft Code do not persecute anyone. They restore legal coherence to a framework that was always intended to protect both trans people and women, and that was hollowed out, institution by institution, policy by policy, tribunal by tribunal, during a decade in which ideological performance counted for more than working class women's actual safety.
The campaign to reduce all of this to a toilet argument is intelligent. It is not honest.
The honest version of the argument would require its advocates to say plainly: we want the legal category "woman" to be defined by identity rather than sex, and we want that definition to take precedence over the sex-based protections women currently hold in law.
Made plainly, that argument would lose. It would lose because most people, without requiring a Supreme Court judgment to guide them, understand that bodies are not merely opinions about bodies, that the reality of male violence against women is not dissolved by a change of identity, and that half the population did not spend a century fighting for legal protections only to be told those protections were a form of prejudice.

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Kate Birrell @kamabi.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

The apology says they ‘never promoted’ the report. Hmmm - does putting it in a parliamentary briefing not count, then? (A briefing that now cannot be downloaded from their website, surprise, surprise). Oh, well

PARLIAMENTARY BRIEFING
who do not 'pass', non-binary people and gender non-conforming people face the risk of being questioned repeatedly on whether they can use a single sex space.
Amnesty International UK has traced a growing anti-trans movement in the UK which has been organising since 2018 to stop the proposed reform of the Gender Reform Act. Only 3 anti-trans groups existed before 2017 and now there are 51. 'Gender critical' anti-trans narratives have been normalised by the press. Just four major UK newspapers published 17000 articles on so-called 'trans issues' between 2020 and 2025, an average of 9 a day. In the reporting trans people were mostly invisible in issues that affect their lives while prime ministers and party leaders were mentioned consistently suggesting that trans rights have been made a high political priority despite the size of the trans population (less than 0.5% of the population), their role in society and the low public interest in these issues. Indeed, ahead of the 2024 General Election, issues related to trans rights or 'sex' and 'gender' did not figure in the top 16 concerns of voters but were by far the most reported by the media amongst 'culture war' issues.

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Kate Birrell @kamabi.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

From amnesty’s website, today

AMNESTY
INTERNATIONAL (plus candle wrapped in barbed wire)

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
ISSUES • GET INVOLVED - KNOWLEDGE HUB •
LATEST ABOUT
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DONATE
Home / Latest
An Apology for A Growing Threat briefing, published on 8 July 2026
Posted
31 July 2026
We apologise for the publication of the briefing "A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK." This document should never have been published, and full responsibility for this error rests with Amnesty International UK.
The briefing was taken down within 48 hours of publication, as soon as management were notified of its existence, was not actively promoted, and will not be republished. We have an ongoing internal investigation into how this briefing came to be published.
Whilst we do not share the views of all these organisations, we recognise the concerns raised by those labelled as "anti-rights" in the document. To be clear: this labelling does not represent our institutional position, and we apologise for its inclusion. In particular, we apologise to Beira's Place and other groups, which we categorised as gender critical organisations, which we should not have collectively labelled as anti-rights. We have also taken down an earlier more discursive briefing (entitled Like A Snowball) which also referenced a wide range of organisations.
AlUK holds itself to the highest standards of research, evidence and editorial oversight in all its publications. We have concluded that this briefing fell significantly short of those standards. We will commission an independent external review to learn from this moment. |
AIUK remains fully committed to defending the human rights, dignity, and equality of all marginalised groups, including women, girls, and members of the trans community.
31 July 2026

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Jon Hawke @archaeohawke.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

The earliest known depiction of the #Trojan #horse, showing the #Greek warriors hidden inside, ca. 670 BCE, 📷 National Geographic. #History #art #mythology #artwork

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Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Musk calls for the assassination of a reporter who embarrassed him with basic questions

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Adam Roberts @adamroberts.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Roses are red Peonies are clustered

BBC News headline: WW2 veteran, 106, puts long life down to custard.

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Mark Hamill @markhamillofficial.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

For those of you that ever wondered what scares the shit out of him: #FabFord

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D. Earl Stephens @dearlstephens.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

📌If Biden had played golf, thrown a party for himself, watched a soccer game and then celebrated himself again after the game, while THREE MORE troops were killed in a war he can't stop ... the GOP would be apoplectic, our media would be on high alert, and there would be calls for him to step down.

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They didn’t like you repeating Amnesty’s slurs. Is Amnesty right, in your opinion, to hold that UK women deserve rights less than African women do?

For Women Scotland
‘Amnesty has campaigned for safe spaces in refugee camps to protect women from sexual violence, and it supports single-sex toilets in schools across sub-Saharan Africa so that girls can manage their menstrual hygiene in safety and privacy. Yet in an astonishing display of hypocrisy, Amnesty argues that Beira’s Place, established by author and women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling is ‘anti-rights’ because it is for women and girls only.’

THIS!

Susan Dalgety
The intellectual void at the heart of Amnesty International. My Scotsman column on Amnesty’s hypocrisy on the rights of women and girls to safe, single sex spaces.

‘Yet for years now, Amnesty has displayed an astonishing contradiction in its own understanding of human rights by singling out British women as hatemongers for standing up for their dignity and rights, while supporting women in Africa arguing for exactly the same thing.

Recent events have caused deep distress to many women defamed by Amnesty, while also exposing the intellectual void at the heart of the organisation. ‘We uncover the truth, and hold the powerful to account’, Amnesty states on its website. Now that the truth about Amnesty is clear, let’s hope its leadership is properly held to account.’

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I’m sorry to be saying this, but the way you are talking makes it sound like you think women, and their needs, should not exist. I don’t think any of the people responding to you have said trans people shouldn’t exist - can you point to anyone who’s said that?

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And they have that - Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre has sessions each week that are trans-inclusive. Why, when your child has (potentially, I do hope not) what they need, are you arguing to stop other people’s children getting what they need?

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Colin Lawson @colindlawson.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

And there may be (are!) parents of raped daughters, who know exactly how important it is to their daughters to have that guaranteed male-free space for their recovery from trauma. They also care immensely for their children…

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Stephanie Pratt, a Specialist Biomedical Scientist with 20 years' NHS experience, is suing the union UNITE! This could be an important case. Trade unions must protect all their members. www.crowdjustice.com/case/why-i-a...

crowdjustice.com

Why I am suing my trade union, UNITE

As a lifelong trade union member I want to stop the climate of fear experienced by UNITE members who hold gender critical beliefs. I hope this action helps all union members across the movement.

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Is this translated from the original German? www.whitehouse.gov/releases/202...

Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller made clear there must be no retreat: “One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pre-textual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence… When the leftist — who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice — protests that we are violating his rights, understand the he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has perpetrated against him. We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”

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Cathy Devine @womensportfeminism.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

The feminist project is to deconstruct gender because it underpins the hierarchy of value & power between the sexes. But not to deny sex. Because full recognition of female people necessitates a recognition of sex when sex matters.

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Cathy Devine @womensportfeminism.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

The human rights of female people are protected throughout all UN human rights treaties on the basis of sex. That does not mean disappearing sex & reverting to a male default. It means that women & girls are human persons with female bodies. Feminists demand equality for that half of humanity.

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Sure - just saying the changeover in musical styles didn’t start with the Beatles/Stones. People in replies talking about Buddy Holly, who was dead by Feb ‘59.

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Not sure what ‘war-adjacent’ songs you’re talking about. 80 yr olds now would be 9 when Rock Around The Clock first hit the UK charts. And 11 for Elvis’ All Shook Up.

In the UK, Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" was released on Brunswick Records (and Germany
as well), reaching number 17 on the UK Singles Chart in January 1955, four months before it first entered the US pop charts. 21] The song re-entered the UK chart to reach number one in
November 1955 for three weeks, and after a three-week break returned there for a further two weeks in January 1956.!22! It re-entered the charts again in September 1956, reaching number 5. The song was re-issued in 1968,
when it made number 20, and again in 1974, when it reached number 12. The song's original
release saw it become the UK's first million selling single and it went on to sell over 1.4 million copies in total. [231

"Rock Around the Clock" is often cited as the biggest-selling vinyl rock and roll single of all time. The exact number of copies sold has never been audited; however, a figure of at least 25 million was cited by the Guinness Book of World Records in its category "Phonograph records:
Biggest Sellers" from the early 1970s until the 1990s, when the advent of compact discs led to Guinness discontinuing the category. Guinness consistently listed "Rock Around the Clock" as having the highest claim of any pop music recording, coming second in sales only to Bing Crosby's 1942 recording of "White Christmas", which was also listed as having sold 25 million copies. Haley's version alone is estimated to have sold 15 million copies, with a total of 25 million copies counting all versions. 271128. A frequently used piece of promotion regarding the song is that it is said to be playing somewhere in the world every minute of the day.

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Probably have to allow for JKR Derangement Syndrome, tho

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