Librarians have been acting like bespectacled zealots in the culture war, suppressing books by gender critical authors like Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock and promoting books by trans right activists, a new report from the Free Speech Union has revealed. The Telegraph has more.
Public libraries have been “captured by woke activists”, campaigners have said after figures showed they have far fewer gender-critical books than trans-activist titles.
Dozens of councils across the country are stuffing their library shelves with books favourable to trans-activist opinions, with some offering no gender-critical alternative.
A survey of 49 major local authorities with online library catalogues, shared exclusively with The Telegraph, shows that two-thirds offer more trans than gender-critical books, despite the latter proving twice as popular in loans.
They have now been accused of “behaving like bespectacled zealots in the culture war” by “censoring books”.
The investigation by the Free Speech Union (FSU) – the first widespread snapshot of the trans debate in public libraries – asked councils how much stock they had of five best-selling trans-activist books, and five of the most popular gender-critical books, in September and October.
The former were books supporting the view that trans women are women and gender can be self-identified, while the latter argued that women must be born female and binary sex cannot be changed.
Some 446 copies of the trans-activist books were held by the public libraries, amounting to 9.1 per council, 62 per cent more than the 274 copies of the gender-critical books, 5.6 per council.
This is despite data from the 49 councils showing that 43 per cent of the gender-critical books were on loan, compared to just 20 per cent of the trans-activist works, suggesting that current stocks are not matching public demand.
Two-thirds of the councils had more trans-activist than gender-critical books, while 14 per cent listed the same number of each genre and just a fifth listed more gender-critical than trans-activist books.
All five of the councils with the fewest gender-critical books were Labour-run: Enfield, Bolton, Wigan, Brent and Ealing, with three of them stocking none at all. In contrast, all of the 49 local authorities had at least one trans-activist book.
Of the nine councils that provided reservation data for books already out on loan, a total of 29 bookings had been made for gender-critical books but zero trans-activist books had been reserved. …
Toby Young, general secretary of the FSU, said: “There are still a lot of sensible librarians out there who believe public libraries shouldn’t take sides on contentious political issues.
“But unfortunately too many libraries have been captured by woke activists behaving like bespectacled zealots in the culture war.”
Worth reading in full.
You can read the FSU’s report here.
Stop Press: The Welsh Government is going to include transwomen in the definition of women in the Gender Quotas Bill, which proposes that half the candidates in any list to be members of the Senedd must be women. For the purposes of the proposed legislation this includes transgender women, according to a leaked draft of the bill. The Telegraph has more.
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Someone posted enquiring about excess mortality, but by the time I have written my reply all of the comments have disappeared, anyway here are some figures for consideration.
The Death rate for the whole of the UK for 2020 was 1.01%. The tricky bit is then to calculate what the death rate would be in a “normal” year. The last 16 years have had an exceptionally low rate of death, so if we take an average over the last five years then death rate was only 0.91%, over the last 20 years it was 0.93%, but over the last 34 years it was a “whopping” 1.01%. All of which would give you an excess mortality somewhere between 0 to 69000 deaths for the year 2020. Either way the death rate last year was none worse than it was in the year 2003 and this year looks to be none worse than it was in 2005 (I’m Currently calculating 2021 death rate to be 0.97% unless things get a lot worse), I don’t recall either 2003 or 2005 as being exceptional as regards pandemics or plagues so who knows, wtf. I have aggregated the ONS data from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and corrected for increase in UK population over the years.
Well said. Someone has produced some useful charts (Thank you!)
This has been known ever since the 2020 peak in deaths. Even the BMJ eventually got around to publishing the ‘non-event’ data. But the fact have made no difference.
But the term ‘excess mortality’ is misleading. Mortality simply varies.
It was a normal flu season hitting upon above average dry tinder, then mislabelled and abused most deliberately, thereby further increasing overall death numbers through collateral damage, by the fraudulent and on top of that unstandardized PCR test, which couldn’t even distinguish between Corona and Rhino viruses, let alone identify the former correctly or reliably.
And that’s even official now.
For the Edinburgh, and later Westminster, inquiry; the indictment:
‘……governments, whose primary role is to protect their citizens, took these punitive actions despite the compelling evidence that these policies were misdirected and very harmful, causing palpable harm to human welfare on so many levels. It’s questionable what governments did (and now threaten to redo) to their populations with no scientific basis. None! In this, we lost our civil liberties and essential rights, all based on spurious ‘science’ or worse including, opinion, speculation, supposition, and whimsy. They just refused to listen, refused to read the data and science, and were blinded to it. Their ‘academically sloppy’ thinking and actions cost lives, and thousands of lives were cut short by their nonsensical and often irrational shutdown and closure policies.’
‘What does all this mean? These misguided policies have eroded the public trust.’
The goal of these inquiries must be a forensic analysis of government interventions, made without any coherent cost/benefit analysis.
‘Future generations will bear the cost of these decisions. Our children and younger people are going to be burdened with the indirect but very real harms and costs of lockdowns for a generation to come. Lives are being ruined and lost and businesses are being destroyed forever. Lower-income Americans, Canadians, and other global citizens are much more likely to be compelled to work in unsafe conditions. These are employees with the least bargaining power, tending to be minority, female, and hourly paid employees. Moreover, Covid-19 has revealed itself as a disease of disparity and poverty. This means that black and minority communities are disproportionately affected by the pandemic itself and they take a double hit, being additionally and disproportionately ravaged by the effects of the restrictive policies.’
https://www.aier.org/article/covid-19-mandates-will-not-work-for-the-delta-variant/
The recommendations of the inquiries should be strategic and far reaching; to include, in my opinion, guidance on extensive constitutional and structural reform of the government and entire public sector of this country. Only a federal system of government has been shown to offer free citizens at least some protection of their fundamental freedoms against totalitarian government.
It would not be surprising, given the hopeless incompetence of the Westminster government throughout this ‘pandemic’, if the Edinburgh inquiry’s recommendations include a further distancing of Scotland from the Westminster parliament.
Few will be able to argue against that, for exactly the same reason.
It would not be surprising, given the hopeless incompetence of the Westminster government throughout this ‘pandemic’, if the Edinburgh inquiry’s recommendations include a further distancing of Scotland from the Westminster parliament.
I doubt the levels of incompetence vary that much across the UK. Anyway this all becomes rather hazy if we view the government measures at both Westminster and Edinburgh as being malicious rather than incompetent.
For me there is nothing inherently better or safer in a federal system if the actors in governments are invariably corrupt, which seems to be the case across the whole spectrum of government systems in the West.
It isn’t so much levels of incompetence, as levels of malice. From that
perspective, Dungford’s standing is high. Make way for the cheap edition of Joseph Stslin, with extra wrinkles and twice the malevolence.
the green agenda seems to be blindly driven by ignorance and ideology….
Unlike nuclear fission (current nuclear power generation), nuclear fusion produces no nuclear waste and simply slows down and drops temperature when things go wrong so no nuclear fallout.
Nuclear fusion power could easily service all our electricity needs – a prototype nuclear fusion power station is hoped to be up and running within 10 years – so bye bye wind turbines etc
While we wait for nuclear fusion to come on line simply use carbon capture for fossil fuel energy production.
problems solved – simples!
The real problem is that the green agenda don’t want the problem solved – the problem is good for their agendas and some only exist for the problem – nuclear fusion will lead to extinction rebellions extinction
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/08/28/alok-sharma-fire-nuclear-industry-claim-have-banned-cop26/
https://www.diffen.com/difference/Nuclear_Fission_vs_Nuclear_Fusion
Given what we know regarding scientists, governments and assorted numpties in relation to covid 19, is there even any kind of climate problem?
‘The (IPCC) AR6 summary paragraph A.1 upgrades IPCC confidence in attribution to “Unequivocal” and the press release boasts of “major advances in the science of attribution.” In reality, for the past 20 years, the climatology profession has been oblivious to the errors in AT99, and untroubled by the complete absence of specification testing in the subsequent fingerprinting literature. These problems mean there is no basis for treating past attribution results based on the AT99 method as robust or valid. The conclusions might by chance have been correct, or totally inaccurate; but without correcting the methodology and applying standard tests for failures of the GM conditions it is mere conjecture to say more than that.’
‘The errors they made come from being experts in one thing but not another, and the review process in both climate journals and IPCC reports is notorious for not involving people with relevant statistical expertise (despite the reliance on statistical methods).’
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/08/19/the-ipccs-attribution-methodology-is-fundamentally-flawed/
I agree, unfortunately the reality is the climate change theories ”the science says” have taken over from science….
carbon capture followed by nuclear fusion solves the problem for the climate change theory and those of us who live in the real world
then maybe we concentrate on the actual problem, polluting our land, sea and air with plastics etc and the destruction of the natural environment by over population human activity – but seems Bill gates has this in hand with his death jab global roll out…
Carbon, essential for all forms of life, is just silly.
The is no climate ‘problem’ except in the ‘other world’ computer models used by fanatics. All except the model run out of Moscow use the same ‘amplifier’ which is not based on scientific fact nor has ever been experienced in the real world. This model term has the CO2 increase somehow amplifying the ‘greenhouse’ effect of water vapour. Without this term the models would only show the same sort of gradual increase in average global temps that have been recorded since 1850, ie about 1C. Of course ‘average global temp’ is a construct that is meaningless. But even here its not maximums that have increased , its minimums that have , we are experiencing a world shattering very slight increase in MILDNESS.
This ‘amplifier term’ is climate change’s SARS2 PCR-test; without it the whole thing falls apart.
The latest IPCC nonsense has reintroduced the discredited ‘hockey curve’ as its running out of real events to scare.
….
no but there is a problem of a belief in a climate problem – thats the problem that needs solving
debunking the strongly held beliefs of a devout worshipper of a religion (climate change) is almost impossible – nuclear fusion will be clean safe limitless energy – the green lobby no longer have an argument and the rest of us can get on with life – problem solved
And don’t forget the oceans will become less alkaline (thus, moving in pH from alkaline towards neutral, aka acidification)
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/08/26/boris-heres-why-net-zero-emissions-by-2050-just-arent-worth-it/
Nuclear fusion is like the climate tipping point, it is always ten years away.
love your negativity – energy from nuclear fusion will be a reality – carbon capture solves any climate change theoretical worries until then – problem solved
Yes it’s been only ten years away for most of my life.
Commercial nuclear fusion has been predicted to be 10 years away for quite a few decades now…
It is becoming increasingly the case that much of the incisive analysis of this fake pandemic is missed on the daily sceptic. You don’t see any critical analysis from Mcullough or Bhakti or the other brave highly credentialed rebels regarding the vaccines.
Is it that TDS doesn’t come across this information or is it that TDS is actively avoiding it?
As a result I find myself spending more time sifting through the avalanche of research dispensed on Robin Minotti and Mike Yeadon Telegram channel rather than this site. Here I spend most of my time reading the reader comments which are fast outpacing the site in their relevance.
Here is a recent podcast from Mccullogh found on Telegram (I highly recommend those in a similar frame of mind download the AP and join the above mentioned channel. Also access to info about protests and like minded groups)
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-mccullough/vaccinated-becoming-persons-SGE3QIBasCf/
Thank you for the links. This site is very careful not to criticise the ‘vaccine’ roll-out , obviously been told to behave by offcom etc.
Interesting that a search on goggle produces no results whereas duckduck is positively verbose.
This is Mrs Bee’s favourite channel too.
She became a sceptic much later than me, but now is even more sceptical than me.
I went off Telegram because it was eating away at my phones storage capacity, but I hear they changed that.
When people believe they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality this is how they behave – the deaths of four million people was not done by gas – it was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance …
Bronowski (The Ascent of Man) on Auschwitz & Science
Somehow relevant and a warning maybe to where once enlightened and free western nations appear to be heading once again … authoritarianism, despotism, tyranny.
A two minute video worth watching and a reminder of how an unyielding doctrine led to the deaths of millions of people …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jl2w3xYFHQ
I just shared this link but my post has disappeared. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/spains-supreme-court-rules-against-using-vaccine-passports-restrict-access-public?s=08
I can see it