mpk

Kinder, Küche, Kosplay?

It's worth noting in the Grauniad's defence that the piece which mentioned them (among others) last year wasn't a commissioned interview article, it was a column by Arwa Mahdawi. Columnists usually have a regular gig to write opinion pieces on some topic relevant to their interests and then submit them for publication -- in other words, they don't have an editor telling them to go and cover something, they write about what they feel like writing about even if it turns out to be at odds with the paper's editorial policy (e.g. Simon Jenkins, who is a Guardian columnist despite regularly expressing some highly un-Guardian-reader views). As Mahdawi is a columnist who regularly focuses on feminist issues and the United States this would be entirely within her field of interest.

Still doesn't mean these people deserve yet more coverage, though. I hope their kids get out of this toxic family having suffered as little harm as possible from a mother who apparently thinks that the only solution to "cheap, good-quality snowsuits bought from Russia" not fitting when you're pregnant is dressing like a tradwife and a father who really doesn't seem to like them and who does an abuse in front of a journalist which he thinks he can just explain away with pseudoscientific bullshit as "hey, that looked like abuse but it wasn't, it was SCIENCE".

Im also annoyed at how much words are written about the Collins. Stop promoting these doofuses. (They have come up in sneerclub before)

Apologies. First time poster, all that stuff.

The corporal punishment thing is a weirdly Anglophone obsession -- assaulting (sorry, "smacking") your kids has been a crime here since 1977 and the kids seem to be alright as well as having the bonus of being less likely to have grown up surrounded by violence and the threat of violence. In 7 years here I've seen exactly one person hit a child in public (looked a lot like a visiting grandma from elsewhere) and it came as a real shock. The more the Collins types (and, of course, fundie types) try to justify this as "normal" the less normal it appears to everyone else.

Pedants being wrong on the Internet is exactly why I have an OED subscription. :) "Beg the question" in the sense of "to assume without proof" doesn't have a supporting quote newer than 1870, which suggests to me that... yeah, it can be considered obsolete.

Romania is putting Andrew Tate on trial. Elmo probably wouldn't dare show his face there.

It's really hard not to draw parallels between Musk's attitude to protesters and the attitude so many white South Africans had to protesting black (and progressive white) people in the 70s and 80s -- just replace "left-wing" with "communist" and you're there. Maybe he grew up seeing the cops beating the shit out of people for protesting on the TV news so often that he thinks that's the norm.

It’s a sign of how completely economically detached from reality these guys are. The annual turnover threshold here for mandatory VAT registration is around €35k, and a lot of small businesses don’t even reach that. Selling widgets and turning over €50k max would not be considered to be minor tax evasion..