Skeptics-in-the-Pub Group open to the public! All welcome to monthly meetings. FB page: https://nitter.gq/t.co/RHxht6gDaS
Teesside
Joined September 2013
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Teesside SitP retweeted
'Why should ‘pro-Palestine’ marchers, or indeed Muslim women in the UK, be allowed to disguise themselves? It used to be that either the law applies to everybody or it applies to nobody. But so far as I can work out, our laws are now contingent on a person’s identity'
@DouglasKMurray in The @spectator
spectator.com/article/who-ex…
Teesside SitP retweeted
Amazon valued its share of Anthropic at $190.4 billion. Only $13 billion of that is actual cash invested. $50.5 billion in paper gains represents an appreciation of its stake in a company that uses investor money to rent computing infrastructure from Amazon itself ↓
Teesside SitP retweeted
This photo depicts Dame Sarah Mullally, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury in its 1400 year history, who was enthroned only in March, this year.
Last Friday on 9/11, the first female Archbishop presented Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi an award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation. He is the chairman of a body called Pakistan Ulema Council.
Next to Ashrafi and totally hidden from sight is his wife. She is not allowed to lead anything.
Teesside SitP retweeted
Children As Young As Five Are Being Promised As Brides In Britain
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's newsletter this week put a number in front of the public that deserved far more attention than it has received. Between 2021 and 2025, Britain's Forced Marriage Unit received at least 100 referrals involving children aged 12 or under. Sixty-two were 10 or younger. Twenty-seven were five or younger. These are Home Office figures, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, not campaigners' estimates.
A referral does not always mean a wedding took place. The Home Office defines it as information about an actual, potential or suspected forced marriage, and officials note that cases involving very young children often involve a promise of future marriage rather than an imminent ceremony. That caveat should not bring anyone much comfort. A promise made over a five-year-old still fixes her future before she can read, before she can choose a friend, before she has any capacity to understand what has been decided for her.
The scale runs deeper than the headline number suggests. Nine referrals in 2022 alone involved children 12 or under with no overseas element at all. No flight abroad, no wedding conducted in another country and quietly ignored on return. Arranged, and in some cases carried out, entirely on British soil. Whatever explanation is offered for this practice, distance is not one of them.
The breakdown by background, reported by GB News from Forced Marriage Unit data, shows Pakistani nationals accounting for 41 per cent of cases, Bangladeshi nationals 9 per cent, and Afghan nationals 7 per cent. Dr Taj Hargey, founder of the Oxford Institute for British Islam, has said such cases should be "condemned without fear of upsetting anyone" by Muslim communities themselves, and that such practices deserve total condemnation. A reformist Muslim academic naming the problem plainly is worth more than a dozen politicians speaking in euphemism.
Dame Jasvinder Sanghera, who fled her own forced marriage at fourteen, calls the number of very young children involved "deeply disturbing." She has also warned that many cases never reach the authorities at all, which means the true figure is almost certainly higher than what any FOI request can capture. Dr Rakib Ehsan makes the same point: most of these children never enter the system in the first place, because a referral depends on someone, a teacher, a neighbour, a relative, being willing to raise the alarm.
That willingness is precisely where the failure sits. Sanghera has specifically flagged the return to school each September as the moment a child who has quietly vanished from a classroom becomes visible again, assuming anyone is looking. A missing pupil is not a mystery. It is a data point that schools, social services and police already hold the tools to notice. What they have lacked, repeatedly, in this case as in others, is the willingness to ask an uncomfortable question about a specific community for fear of where the answer leads.
Forced marriage has been a criminal offence in Britain for over a decade. Since 2023, the law closes the previous loophole that let sixteen and seventeen year olds marry with parental consent. None of that legislation reaches a five-year-old quietly promised to a future husband inside her own home, because no ceremony has yet occurred for any law to punish. The gap between what the law criminalises and what is actually happening to these children is exactly where this practice survives.
Britain does not need a new definition of forced marriage. It needs professionals willing to ask why a child has stopped turning up, and to keep asking until they get an honest answer.
"The breakdown by background shows Pakistani nationals accounting for 41 per cent of cases, Bangladeshi nationals 9 per cent, and Afghan nationals 7 per cent."
Always check political assertions. Especially the UN. If a crime "does not rot" and descendents are guilty then NOBODY is innocent. youtube.com/shorts/kowA9KhLz…
Teesside SitP retweeted
This is one of the most important essays I've read all year: @Ayaan ripping into The Economist for its lies about European Islam and the so-called "far right."
thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-…
Teesside SitP retweeted
Mao – The Bloodiest Idiot Who Ever Lived
Between 45 and 80 million dead. Not in war. Not in camps, mostly. In peacetime, in a country at peace with itself, killed by a series of decisions so stupid that a competent farmer could have refuted every one of them in an afternoon. This is what happens when a warlord with no education in anything runs a billion people – and is applauded from Paris while he does it.
1. The sparrows. In 1958 he decided the birds were eating the grain. So the entire country was mobilized to kill them: villagers banging pots and drums for days so the sparrows could not land, until they dropped dead from exhaustion. Hundreds of millions killed. Then came the locusts, which the sparrows had been eating. The harvest was devoured. The country had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union. A single conversation with an ornithologist – or a farmer – would have prevented it. There was no such conversation, because by then nobody told Mao anything he had not already decided.
2. The backyard furnaces. He wanted to overtake British steel production, so ordinary people were ordered to smelt steel in their yards. Millions of households melted down their own pots, tools, door handles and farm implements in mud furnaces, burning their furniture and their doors for fuel. What came out was unusable pig iron, immediately discarded. They had destroyed working tools to produce slag. And they had done it during harvest season, so the crops rotted in the fields while the peasantry played at metallurgy.
3. The planting theories. Close planting: crowd the seeds together, because plants of the same class do not compete. Deep ploughing: turn the soil to two metres, because deeper roots mean bigger yields. Both were nonsense, both were imposed nationwide on the authority of a man who had never farmed, and both destroyed the harvest wherever they were applied. The agronomists who knew better had learned what happened to agronomists who knew better.
4. Then the lie ate the country. Local officials, facing quotas and terror, reported harvests that did not exist. The state requisitioned grain proportional to the fake numbers. So the villages that had reported the biggest imaginary surpluses had the most real grain taken away. People starved beside empty granaries while China exported food to prove the Leap was working. This is the systemic lie in its purest form: a country that had made truth a crime, then starved on the arithmetic.
5. Between 45 and 80 million dead. The range is that wide because nobody counted – counting would have been a political act. And when Mao was informed, at the Lushan conference in 1959, that the policy was killing people, the man who told him was denounced and purged, and the campaign was intensified. There is no version of this where he did not know. There is only a version where knowing did not matter.
6. Then he did it again to the mind. The Cultural Revolution: students beating teachers, children denouncing parents, temples and libraries and instruments burned, a decade spent severing a four-thousand-year-old civilization from its own memory. Not a side effect – the objective. Destroy the transmission and the new man appears. The new man did not appear. Only the wreckage did.
7. And all the while, Paris applauded. The French intelligentsia – professors, editors, philosophers, entire journals – declared Maoism the future, made the Little Red Book fashionable, and treated any report of the famine as reactionary propaganda. They were not deceived; the reports were available. They simply preferred the theory to the peasants. Sartre and his circle backed the Cultural Revolution while it was burning the libraries. They paid nothing. They were never asked to.
The lesson is not that Mao was evil, though he was. It is that he was stupid – and that stupidity at the top is only lethal when nothing below can correct it. Kill the price signal, kill the free press, kill the expert who contradicts you, and there is no mechanism left to stop a bad idea about sparrows before it becomes forty-five million funerals.
Every system that abolishes correction eventually kills at the scale of its own ignorance. Mao’s ignorance was enormous, and so was his population.
And his portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square.
Pol Pot – What Happens When a True Believer Takes Power.
He learned it in Paris. And he thought it was for real – not just the moral posturing of irresponsible French intellectuals in their Parisian cafés.
That was the difference. And the difference was two million dead.
Most communist leaders were opportunists. They used the ideology to seize power, and once they had it, the ideology bent to serve the power. Stalin was a gangster with a philosophy. Mao was a warlord with a manifesto. They killed millions – but in the service of control, not conviction.
Pol Pot was a true believer. And that made him the most dangerous kind.
In the early 1950s, as a scholarship student in Paris, he encountered the French Communist Party, the Marxist study circles, the cafés of the Latin Quarter where the ideas circulated among students who would never face the consequences of taking them seriously. The French intellectuals produced these ideas from comfortable apartments – moral posturing, civilizational performance, the gesture of opposition without the risk of implementation. They never intended it to be taken literally.
Pol Pot took it literally.
He returned to Cambodia with the complete theory in his head and the absolute conviction that it was correct. And when he took power in April 1975, he did not wait. Within days – within days – he ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh. Two million people expelled from the capital on foot, at gunpoint, regardless of age or condition. Hospitals emptied. Patients wheeled out on their beds into the street. Because the city was the problem – the center of capitalism, corruption, bourgeois contamination. An honest communist works in the fields. So everyone would work in the fields.
Then he abolished money. Completely. Overnight. The most total implementation of Marxist economics ever attempted – no currency, no markets, no private property, no trade. The economy would be organized by the Angkar – the Organization, which knew what people needed and would provide it. This is what the theory says. He did what it said.
Year Zero. The past abolished. The educated eliminated – they carried the old consciousness in their heads. The family destroyed – it created loyalties that competed with the collective. Glasses confiscated – wearing them suggested literacy, which suggested education, which suggested bourgeois contamination. The killing fields were not a deviation from the theory. They were its conclusion, applied by a man who had read the texts carefully and believed them completely.
Between 1975 and 1979, approximately two million Cambodians died – a quarter of the entire population. Executed, starved, worked to death.
The French intellectuals who produced the ideas that formed him were never held responsible. Sartre continued to write. The cafés continued to operate. In the universities of Paris and Berkeley and Columbia, professors explained that Cambodia was a deviation, an excess, a misapplication.
It was not a deviation. It was the experiment. The answer to the question: what happens when you take the theory seriously and have the power to implement it without constraint?
The intellectuals who taught him went home for dinner. He went home to Cambodia.
That is the difference between posturing and belief. And it is why ideas have consequences – especially the ones that are never meant to be taken seriously.
Teesside SitP retweeted
In response to the clip going around with the African lady saying 'WHAT WHITE CULTURE!?!'
Because I can explain it in more detail than anyone else... here are the main things that create western civilisation.
The principle, the law of nature that is an adaptation to and what operation it creates in our civilisation.
THE WESTERN CIVILISATION STACK
Western civilisation can be understood as a set of adaptations to the laws of nature that allow millions of people to cooperate, solve problems and innovate together.
1. SOVEREIGNTY — Let people act.
Law of nature: Knowledge and ability are distributed among individuals.
No ruler or institution can know everything everyone knows. Sovereignty gives people freedom to choose, experiment and solve problems for themselves. That creates millions of independent problem-solvers instead of waiting for one authority to find the answer.
2. RECIPROCITY — Don’t impose your costs on others.
Law of nature: Cooperation survives when it benefits both sides.
Freedom cannot mean freedom to steal, defraud, injure or force others to carry your costs. Reciprocity means pursuing your interests while respecting the same right in others. It turns conflict into cooperation and makes peaceful life among strangers possible.
3. RESPONSIBILITY — Make people accountable for consequences.
Law of nature: Every action produces consequences.
Freedom works when the person making a decision also bears responsibility for its results. When people can keep the benefits of their choices while forcing the costs onto others, cooperation breaks down. Responsibility reconnects choice with consequence.
4. PROPERTY — Make control and consequences clear.
Law of nature: Resources are scarce and cannot satisfy every competing use at once.
Property establishes who controls something, who may use or exchange it, and who bears the consequences of those decisions. That reduces conflict, encourages people to improve what they possess, and makes investment and long-term planning possible.
5. TRUTH — Correct error faster than reality punishes you for it.
Law of nature: Reality does not change because we believe something false.
Truthful testimony, open criticism and evidence allow people to discover mistakes before those mistakes become catastrophes. A civilisation that can criticize and correct itself can learn faster than one that protects comforting falsehoods.
6. CONTRACT — Make cooperation possible across time.
Law of nature: Cooperation requires predictable future behaviour.
Promises backed by reputation and law allow strangers to trust one another enough to cooperate. Contract lets one person invest today because another can credibly promise performance tomorrow. That makes enormous networks of specialization, trade and investment possible.
7. RULE OF LAW — Replace arbitrary power with predictable rules.
Law of nature: People have conflicting interests, and power creates opportunities for predation.
Law provides a common procedure for resolving disputes without violence or personal rule. When rulers and citizens are both constrained by known rules, people can cooperate, invest and experiment without constantly fearing arbitrary interference.
8. DUE PROCESS — Test accusations instead of trusting authority.
Law of nature: Human beings are biased, mistaken and sometimes dishonest.
An accusation is not proof. Evidence, defense, confrontation, impartial judgment and appeal create an adversarial process for discovering error. Due process protects both society from wrongdoing and individuals from arbitrary punishment.
9. DECENTRALISATION — Let many solutions compete.
Law of nature: No one knows in advance which adaptation will work best.
Families, firms, towns, institutions and governments can try different solutions to different problems. Failures can remain local while successful solutions spread. Decentralisation therefore turns society itself into a continuous experiment.
10. MARKETS — Let reality select among competing solutions.
Law of nature: Evolution advances through variation, selection and retention.
Markets allow people to try different products, services and ways of organising resources. People select among them through voluntary choice. Successful solutions attract resources; unsuccessful ones disappear or improve. Markets turn millions of choices into continuous social learning.
11. SPECIALISATION — Let differences become advantages.
Law of nature: People differ in knowledge, ability, resources and circumstances.
Instead of everyone doing everything badly, specialization lets people become exceptionally good at different things and exchange the results. Cooperation converts human differences from a source of conflict into a source of increasing productivity.
12. SCIENCE — Institutionalise error correction.
Law of nature: A false model eventually fails when tested against reality.
Science turns doubt into a productive institution: observe, propose, test, criticize, replicate and correct. Knowledge therefore does not have to depend upon authority or tradition. Every generation can discover where the previous generation was wrong and build upon what it got right.
13. CAPITAL — Preserve successful adaptations.
Law of nature: Progress compounds only when successful adaptations survive.
Tools, businesses, infrastructure, institutions and knowledge allow yesterday’s successful experiments to become tomorrow’s starting point. Each generation does not begin again from zero. It inherits accumulated solutions and adds another layer.
14. EDUCATION — Transfer accumulated knowledge between generations.
Law of nature: Individuals die; knowledge does not have to.
Writing, schools, apprenticeships and universities allow discoveries to survive their discoverers. Instead of every generation rediscovering mathematics, engineering, medicine and law, it begins with thousands of years of accumulated learning.
15. COMMONS — Build things that make everyone more capable.
Law of nature: Cooperation can produce benefits no individual could produce alone.
Courts, roads, standards, security, scientific knowledge, infrastructure and trustworthy institutions multiply everyone's ability to act. A successful civilisation does more than protect private interests: it continually creates shared capital that makes future cooperation cheaper and more productive.
THE RESULT
These principles form a system:
Sovereignty creates experimentation.
Reciprocity makes it peaceful.
Responsibility makes it sustainable.
Property makes interests clear.
Truth corrects error.
Contract creates trust across time.
Law suppresses predation.
Decentralisation preserves alternatives.
Markets select successful solutions.
Specialisation multiplies productivity.
Science accelerates discovery.
Capital preserves what works.
Education transmits it.
Commons multiply everyone's capabilities.
That is the deeper logic of the Western stack:
Stable rules + distributed freedom + relentless error correction = cooperation at scale and accelerating innovation.
Teesside SitP retweeted
In the UK, the share of white British pupils in grammar schools has fallen from 66 to 44% in 10 years.
In state primary schools in England, the share has collapsed from 80% in 2003, to below 60% today.
There are 142 parliamentary seats in England where white British pupils are a minority.
As they are in one-quarter of all schools across the country, and virtually everywhere in London, our capital city.
In state nurseries, white British toddlers have already entered minority status across the country, representing 47% of all toddlers.
In 2023, Muhammad officially replaced Noah as the most popular boys name in England & Wales.
Not everybody wants to talk about what is happening to Britain and why it matters.
But we will.
Our newsletter will always tell you what is really going on ⬇️
Teesside SitP retweeted
WATCH: Muslim schools in Britain STOP mandating hijab on underage school girls as policy. It is ABSURD & also NOT what any interpretation of Islam teaches.
From @GBNEWS last night with @MichelleDewbs
Teesside SitP retweeted
After we raised the alarm over an independent Islamic school joining the state sector with compulsory hijab for girls as young as 7, the Education Secretary has now said mandatory hijab is unacceptable - and the school has dropped the rule.
secularism.org.uk/news/2026/…
Teesside SitP retweeted
The Law Miliband Invokes Doesn't Say What He Claims It Says
Ed Miliband calls Israeli settlements illegal under international law, as though the phrase settles the matter by itself. It doesn't. Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from "deporting or transferring" parts of its civilian population into occupied territory. Barrister Natasha Hausdorff argues that this regulates state-directed population transfer, not the voluntary movement of civilians, and does not establish a general prohibition on people of a particular nationality living there. She made that case in the Spectator this month, and it deserves wider attention than it's had.
The claim that Israel occupies foreign sovereign territory assumes a Palestinian state existed in 1948 or 1967 with recognised title to the West Bank. None did. Under the ordinary legal doctrine of uti possidetis juris, applied from Latin American independence to the break-up of Yugoslavia, a new state inherits the boundaries of the administrative territory it emerges from. On that application of uti possidetis juris, Israel inherited the Mandate's boundaries. The 1949 armistice lines were explicitly described by the parties who signed them as ceasefire lines, not borders. The documents themselves are explicit on that point.
Even granting the occupation framing for argument's sake, the "illegal settlements" claim still collapses on its own terms. Professor Eugene Kontorovich's peer-reviewed global study documented eight comparable cases of prolonged occupation with substantial settler populations, Turkish settlement in Northern Cyprus affecting over 100,000 civilians, Moroccan settlement in Western Sahara involving hundreds of thousands, Indonesian settlement in East Timor. None drew the sustained legal condemnation, sanctions or ICC pressure now aimed at Israel. If the legal principle were being applied consistently, these cases would have triggered the same response years ago. They didn't. The principle is not being applied consistently, but invoked selectively against Israel.
Miliband's own Commons statement contained a specific, checkable claim: that Bedouin communities in Khan al-Ahmar have lived on that land for generations. Israeli researchers, using aerial photography going back decades, have repeatedly shown the site itself was largely empty until settlement began in the 1970s and grew through the 1980s and beyond. Even the Times of Israel was forced to issue a correction after reporting the "since the 1950s" version uncritically.
That doesn't mean the Jahalin tribe lacks a longer history of displacement. It doesn't. Their displacement traces back to expulsion from the Negev in the 1950s. But the specific claim about this specific site, generations of continuous habitation, doesn't survive contact with the documentary record, and a Foreign Secretary citing it as settled fact in Parliament should have checked first.
None of this requires pretending settlement expansion is uncomplicated or that Palestinian grievances aren't real. It requires applying the same legal standard consistently, rather than reaching for uti possidetis juris everywhere except the one country it's politically convenient to ignore, and rather than repeating a specific factual claim about Khan al-Ahmar researchers have already contested with evidence.
Miliband built his case on "international law is clear." The law he's citing isn't clear in the way he needs it to be, and the one fact he offered in support of his argument doesn't hold up to the aerial photographs taken of the very ground in question. A Foreign Secretary asking Britain to sanction an ally on legal grounds owes the Commons more rigour than that.
"Miliband says international law settles the argument. Natasha Hausdorff argues that the law says something rather different."
Teesside SitP retweeted
It has been 50 years since this photo was taken. Palestinian terrorists invaded the Lebanese Christian town of Damour and massacred 582 Christian civilians.
It was an apocalypse, recounted a priest who survived the massacre.
“They were coming in thousands, screaming ‘Allahu Akbar! Let us attack them for the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Muhammad.’
They were slaughtering everyone, men, women, and children.”
Men were lined up against the walls of their homes and gunned down.
Women were tortured and gang-raped.
Babies were shot in the back of their heads.
Pregnant women had their babies cut out of their wombs.
Just one of the many massacres committed against Christians by Palestinians. This is how Muslims became the majority in Lebanon. Learn from history.
Teesside SitP retweeted
LABOUR'S £1 BILLION INVASION: Foreign Mafia Control French Ports, Ex-SAS Expose State-Enabled Trafficking
French police lit the route while holding British journalists at gunpoint. Ex-SAS veterans watched smugglers in balaclavas load mega-dinghies for multiple taxi-runs to Britain. Belgian buses transport them free. NGOs hand out UK asylum forms at water coolers. Cash cards, life jackets, organized decoy operations.
Five thousand lorries roll into Britain daily from French ports migrants load into trailers in broad daylight while security booths sit empty and police guard the gates. The French arrested no one. Labour pays for this.
The invasion is deliberate, organized, and state-sponsored.
Teesside SitP retweeted
This is why the old parties in the West REFUSE to give you/or collect data on migration and criminality. Because what data there is points clearly to one conclusion ⬇️ They lecture you about “misinformation” while not wanting you to see more information like this …
Teesside SitP retweeted
“And there is one final asymmetry, the one that ought to settle the matter once and for all. There is no flight from Europe by anyone—no community, no religious minority, no ethnic group, no political tendency—as a consequence of European far-right violence. No Muslims, no Jews, no atheists, no ex-Muslims, no gay men and women are packing suitcases in Frankfurt or Manchester or Marseille and applying for asylum in Cairo or Islamabad or Algiers because European far-right militants have made their lives untenable at home. The traffic runs, on a massive scale, in the opposite direction, and it has run in the opposite direction for two generations. Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, Baha’is, Ahmadiyyas, ex-Muslims, secularists, feminists, gay men and women, and religious minorities of every description are leaving the Muslim-majority world in millions, and they are coming to Europe and the rest of the West. They come because Europe, whatever else it is, is not governed by the doctrinal architecture they are fleeing. The presence of a European far right that occasionally shouts at them, or, at the violent extreme, produces a Breivik or a Tarrant, has not slowed the movement at all. If the two extremisms were symmetrical, the flow would also be symmetrical. It is not even close. The direction of migration by itself—that is, the votes of feet cast in their tens of millions by the very people who know both worlds—is a stronger empirical statement about the relative danger of the two phenomena than any Home Office report, academic study, or half-baked media essay will ever be.”
thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-…
Teesside SitP retweeted
Celebrate the end of Starmer. But be realistic about what’s coming.
A major debt crisis. Record high taxes. Deteriorating public services as we are pushed further into a population trap. Rising unemployment, especially among the young. Selling out British workers through ongoing mass immigration. Tearing up the social contract through ongoing broken borders and two-tier ideology. Continuing the managed decline of the nation.
Changing leaders will not change our political economy. If anything, shifting left will make it worse.
Teesside SitP retweeted
This statement appears to be motivated by anti-white and anti-British hatred. We never hear a word from this arsehole when British people are murdered by imported savages.
Absolutely appalling.
No one should face violence on our streets. The suspect appears to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred. I will not tolerate this - he will face the full force of the law.
My thoughts are with those who are injured and I thank the police and the emergency services for their response.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2x…
Teesside SitP retweeted
In case you missed it, in the past two days 798 illegals have entered the UK via eleven dinghies.
Teesside SitP retweeted
The biggest slavers of all were North Africans. The primary sellers of slaves at source were all black Africans, and Europe and North America received far less slaves than South America. Slavery today is bigger than the historic slave trade, so lets tackle that first.
African and Caribbean nations call for formal apology for transatlantic slavery bbc.in/4eTA6ur
