Notices by Flick ?? (flick@spinster.xyz)

https://spectator.com/article/when-teenage-rapists-walk-free/

Almost all civilised societies that have ever existed would execute these rapists without a second thought. They have committed crimes of surpassing evil, which they clearly took great pleasure in. Two of them raped on more than one occasion, escalated to using a knife, sought to degrade their victims and even filmed their crimes, meaning their guilt cannot be in question. Their relative youth is no excuse. If they are old enough to rape girls at knifepoint, they are old enough to be sentenced as men. A just Britain, which actually cared about the safety of women and girls, would send these boys to the gallows. […]

Putting aside the questions of whether having ADHD or being stupid make or excuse a rapist (because of course they don’t), this case reveals a deeper rot in how we approach justice and sentencing. Characteristics which make someone more dangerous and more likely to offend are officially defined in the sentencing guidelines as mitigating when they are aggravating. Those criminals who are low IQ, don’t understand the concept of consent and are easily led are much more likely to continue committing crimes. As noted criminal barrister Adam King said to me, ‘given their disproportionately high rates of reoffending, young, impulsive criminals can be seen as precisely the people law-abiding citizens need protecting from.’

https://archive.ph/6djIF

https://spectator.com/article/why-did-the-police-cuff-henry-nowak/

Even accepting that dealing with a street brawl at midnight is not easy when it is unclear who if anyone was in the right, this raises questions. If someone is weak and spurting blood, one might have thought that arresting them was fairly pointless. They are unlikely to go far, and the first priority should be to get them to a hospital. A general policy of arresting anyone who has been involved in a fight (no-one knows who to believe) is one thing. Not making an exception where one party is seriously injured and needs immediate help isn’t, shall we say, in the best traditions of policing.

But this may not be the real reason why the victim was arrested and handcuffed. There is a more worrying possibility, at least hinted at in the reports: that Nowak’s arrest was an immediate reaction to the suggestion that he had racially abused Digwa, and had this simply been a case of a person alleged to have started a fight he would not have been cuffed but simply rushed to hospital. If this is right, then the Hampshire Police have a serious case to answer, and not simply because their arrest of Nowak may have led to his unnecessary death.

https://archive.ph/rzByK

@BowsacNoodle I can see her point, but that way lies multi-generational family revenge killings and the like.

After subsidence left a country road riddled with almighty craters, workmen were sent out to clean up the mess.

It all went awry, however, when their own lorry fell victim to a large hole in the road.

Contractors from Stabilised Pavements were working at Butleigh Drove near Walton in Somerset when their lorry rolled into a ditch that had given way on the uneven surface.

The workers were forced to abandon the vehicle after it settled at a 45-degree angle, metres from a sign reading “skid risk, max speed 20mph”.

When I first moved here, I had a few odd jobs that needed doing and I found a company, “Buxton Handyman”, and a couple of guys turned up a few days later and sorted them out.

I’ve used them a few times over the years, and was aware that they were growing and able to take on bigger jobs, so in the last couple of years I’ve had them do my living room re-model (remember that hideous stone fireplace? shudder) and redecorate my hallways. Getting on for £20k of work. They recently rebranded as BHM Group.

I had some conifers come down in a storm recently, leaving my oil tank very visible, and then Iran happened and I decided I needed to do something about that. Bought a nice metal trellis, dropped their admin person an email asking for them to get it booked in urgently, acknowledgment and ballpark quote then crickets for a couple of weeks until I sent them a slightly sniffy email, which got me a date three weeks away.

So today I put a message on the village WhatsApp, and a nice young man has just been round to have a look. He’ll do it on Saturday, and his “if it takes a lot longer than I expect” price is a fifth of the ballpark quote from my usual people.

I’ll probably still use BHM Group for big jobs, but the small stuff is evidently not worth the effort any more. Shame, they’re nice lads.

https://spectator.com/article/shameless-britain-we-are-a-nation-of-shoplifters/

It’s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he’d been sacked just for doing his job – for stopping a thief nicking booze – and national outrage over the whole affair is still running high. […]

But the feeling for Sean isn’t just a swell of support for one man; it’s also a symptom of wider frustration. Shoplifting across the nation is at the highest level since records began two decades ago. Do nothing, we’re told, leave it to the police – but they also do nothing. And this is really why Sean’s story has hit a national nerve. British people have watched the norms we grew up with unravel in just a generation – the old taboos lift like mist, against stealing, littering, yelling abuse. In February this year, half of all people polled admitted to dropping litter on the street. Yet we’re told, like Sean, not to act, to leave well enough alone.

https://archive.ph/WWLnD

https://spectator.com/article/the-spectators-notes-2/

My sister has unearthed my precious copy of The Junior Puffin Quiz Book, published in 1966, when I was ten. […]

A single question which encapsulates, including its careful semi-colons, the lost culture The Junior Puffin Quiz Book represents: ‘Is a psaltery (a) the book of Psalms; (b) a kind of musical instrument; (c) a term used in heraldry; or (d) a kind of fossil?’ What ten-year-old today knows what a psaltery is? How many more even know what the Psalms are or a single fact about heraldry? […]

What I most notice is the book’s underlying, self-fulfilling assumption that children could and should know a great deal about a wide world. The book also has the spirit of enquiry. It loves to investigate meanings in order to spread knowledge. Hence this: ‘What is the meaning of the word “quick” in the phrase “the quick and the dead”? Do you know of any other phrase in which “quick” has meaning?’ The answer says, ‘“Quick” here means “living”. The quick is the living part of the nail. And if we cut this, we are “hurt to the quick”. A quicksand is as it were a living sand; a quickset hedge is a hedge of living plants as opposed to a fence; quicksilver (or mercury) seems alive as it moves about.’ How full, how economical, yet how poetical.

https://archive.ph/KrP83

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/29/why-is-oxford-indulging-a-lecturer-who-wears-his-plastic-breasts-at-work/

The undergraduates Rattley tutors at Oxford are not children, but many are young and away from home for the first time. It is not unreasonable to expect basic professionalism and respect. Fellow Oxford professor Michael Biggs tells me there is ‘a strong case that Mr Rattley is creating a degrading and offensive environment, especially for female students, which would constitute sexual harassment’. ‘Adults should be free to explore their sexual interests in private with other consenting adults, but not to bring them to work’, he adds.

Dr Dionne Joseph, a clinical psychologist who has drawn attention to Rattley’s conduct, agrees. She described it as ‘highly anti-social, abnormal, boundary-violating, paraphilic’, and criticised the University of Oxford for failing to take action. ‘I see it as a form of (mental) sexual assault and institutional coercive control.’

https://spectator.com/article/a-social-media-ban-for-kids-puts-all-our-privacy-at-risk/

It is not hard to see that for all the good intentions, age-based restrictions to social media amount to a Trojan horse for a de facto mandatory digital ID system. Biometric face scans, often falsely presented as a privacy-safe method of age verification, will fail for millions of people: no algorithm can tell the difference between a 16-year-old on the day of their birthday and the day before. Many more users – adults with facial disabilities, young-looking women, or anyone who isn’t white – will face a significantly higher risk of being prompted to upload an ID document because the algorithm cannot accurately verify their age. And so, a biased and inaccurate algorithm will be the arbiter of who does – and who does not – need to upload their ID to unlock huge swathes of the internet.

https://spectator.com/article/voters-get-the-politicians-they-deserve-so-get-ready-for-pm-polanski/

We have not woken up. Not the electorate, not the politicians. Defence is only the most obvious of those areas where we reside in a delusion which allows us to spaff our money on welfare payments for people who identify as ‘anxious’, rather than on defending the country. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves et al know that we need to invest in our woefully denuded armed forces, and yet the current spend is still a lamentable 2.3 per cent of GDP, despite all the rhetoric. Instead, luxuries remain at the top of the spending list.

Then there is energy. We have the highest energy prices in Europe for industry and the second highest (as a consequence of taxes) for domestic consumers. Donald Trump’s war against Iran has raised the prospect of our country running out of food, never mind oil, and yet our Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, is wholly averse to drilling for oil or indeed to any attempt to provide energy for Britain which is not based upon milking the supple breasts of transgender otters for their sweet-smelling carbon neutral nectar. This is an absurdity. Ed is not an idiot. He must know. And yet he is trapped in a luxurious ideological prison where the imperatives of 30 years ago are the only ones that matter.

https://archive.ph/Nnpj5

An Ian story.

One of my university lecturers, “John”, once mentioned in passing that he’s got interested in art history after he read a “trashy science fiction novel” that had Bosche’s Garden of Earthly Delights on the cover.

I immediately thought “aha”, because I knew it had to be Ian’s The Gardens of Delights, and he was in stitches when I told him the story a few months later, so we cooked up a plan: I tracked down a copy of that edition and posted it to him, with a return envelope addressed to John. Inside, Ian wrote “Dear John, I’m very proud that my trashy science fiction novel had such a big impact on your life” and signed it.

Obviously, John recognised my handwriting on the envelope, put two and two together and made three.

Once John realised that no, I hadn’t forged it, he was simultaneously absolutely delighted by the signed copy and mortified that I had told Ian how he described the book. Ian was literally cackling when I described the scene to him.

RT: https://spinster.xyz/objects/56a866a4-fa9e-467d-8759-75dde56dab24

@graf @flick @phnt @georgia MK’s always said she’ll keep it going, so hopefully she would at least give enough notice that I can figure btrf.ly out enough to get a replacement going.

Although just shoving everyone over there would also be deeply amusing, to me at least.

Does the Catholic Church still do this kind of thing? It seems so bizarre to me.

Look at UK energy policy and you’ll see at its heart a moronic metric, where burning gas bought from Norway does not count in the same way towards our emissions target, as burning gas we already possess does. (By this hand-washing logic, we should simply make all UK gas reserves the personal property of Ed Miliband, blame him for the resulting emissions and then sacrifice him on an altar; this approach worked in the Old Testament, after all.)

Sounds like a plan.

@graf @georgia @phnt FWIW, there’s now a vote from me on there.

I just thought it was that polls don’t federate properly?

Apparently, Covid tests are still purchasable. No word on whether they are still set off by orange juice.

The world is weird.

Avoid ill or old people if you have a cold, job done.

Good point from Julie (my emphasis):

https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/04/07/the-rampant-misogyny-of-transing-elizabeth-i/

Famous women are rare in history. They are generally there because they dared to do what was not expected of them – sometimes on pain of death. Yet somehow, it’s now ‘progressive’ to cancel them out by posthumously changing their sex. It’s especially idiotic in the case of Elizabeth I, who if she had really been born male (and let’s remember that royal births have been witnessed by the courtiers and politicians of the day, a practice which only ended in 1948, prior to the birth of Prince Charles) would not have seen her mother executed, when Elizabeth was still a child. Her father married and murdered multiple times because he couldn’t get a male heir. It’s telling that those who scream most loudly about having their feelings hurt when they’re called Martha instead of Arthur don’t mind trampling all over the graves of women killed by the savage misogyny of the age. Their lack of respect for the dead reminds one of the way rape and murder victims once had their reputations trashed by authorities defending violent males.

https://spectator.com/article/its-easy-to-blame-big-tech-for-the-results-of-parental-neglect/

If a child found Mr. Kipling cakes particularly addictive and began overindulging to the point of becoming overweight or unwell, would we be right to sue the baker? Or would it make more sense to ask whether the parent had enabled the behaviour by leaving the packets within easy reach, refusing to set limits or using them as a convenient babysitter?

A Los Angeles jury has just delivered a landmark verdict against Meta and Google, finding both companies negligent for designing addictive platforms that harmed the mental health of a young user, known as Kaley. The £4.5 million awarded in damages, with Meta shouldering the lion’s share, has been hailed as social media’s ‘Big Tobacco moment’. Tech firms, it’s argued, acted recklessly in knowingly hooking children with infinite scrolls, auto-play and algorithmic dopamine hits, and so they are therefore fully responsible for the depression and anxiety that ensued.

It is a seductive narrative. It’s also a comforting one, because it shifts responsibility away from the place it is most uncomfortable and most necessary to look at: the home.

(Archive still down, sorry.)

https://spectator.com/article/how-the-nazis-used-vanity-to-lure-pilots-to-their-deaths/

To earn a Knight’s Cross, a pilot needed to amass a certain tally of aerial “victories”. The quotas were officially discretionary but universally known. Pilots tracked their scores with the obsessive devotion of schoolboys swapping Pokemon. As they crept towards the magic number, something fascinating happened: they got dramatically better. […]

Then, inevitably, the slump. Medal pinned on, photographs taken, handshake from Hermann Goring or the Führer himself – and performance dropped like a stone. The prize was won. The hunger vanished. Until, that is, the next prize appeared.

A medal, like a Birkin bag, derives its power from scarcity. Once many officers wear a Knight’s Cross, it ceases to signal what it once did. You might as well be wearing last season’s Hermès. That is why the Knight’s Cross was not a single award. It was a ladder – and the Luftwaffe kept adding rungs. As the war dragged on and the basic decoration became less and less exclusive, the High Command unveiled successively grander variants: first Oak Leaves, then Swords, then Diamonds, and finally – with a magnificence that bordered on self-parody – Golden Oak Leaves with Swords and Diamonds. Each time the regime launched a new variant, the familiar pattern reasserted itself: sprint, medal, slump. Sprint, medal, slump. A hedonic treadmill at 15,000 feet.

https://archive.ph/nC4xT

@Kang_Kong3 Oh indeed:

There is a lesson here for anyone who runs an organisation, but perhaps not a comfortable one. Employee-of-the-month schemes, tiered loyalty cards, sales leaderboards, the entire apparatus of gamified workplace motivation – they all run on the same psychological fuel that kept Luftwaffe aces climbing into their cockpits. Status rewards are potent, but they depreciate. Hand them out too freely and they become wallpaper. Be stingy, and nobody thinks they are in the running. The trick is to keep medals rare but within reach for top performers, and to keep inventing new distinctions. In this way, the best performers never quite reach the summit. Whether you should want to is another question altogether. The German air force extracted thousands of extra kills from a few pounds of iron and ribbon. It also sent young men to their deaths, chasing glory, driven to ruin by the glittering success of men who once shared their mess table. Ecclesiastes, one suspects, would not have been surprised.