A brief summary of the Pornhub stury so far:

1. Pornhub started off December with a fairly decent reputation, as far as porn sites go.
2. Then the New York Times published a story on December 4th accusing the site of being “infested with rape videos” and of making money off “child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.”
3. Following a push by evangelical group Exodus Cry, among others, Visa and MasterCard shut down payments to Pornhub.
4. Pornhub have since removed everything on the site that was…

The trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme has been released, and then pretty much immediately dismantled by everyone in Ireland at once. I made the mistake of watching it to see what was so bad.

It’s hard to do justice to just how awful this looks. The accents are so poor that Christopher Walken is somehow more convincing as an Irishman than Jamie Dornan, even though Jamie Dornan is Northern Irish born and raised. The setting is so insultingly quaint that the reference to freezing eggs is the sole indication that it’s not set in 1953. …

There’s no getting around it. It’s a three-part argument, with very little room for debate:

1. Donald Trump is a fascist. There’s room for some argument here, but he’s a quasi-fascist at best, and a full-blown fascist at worst.
2. People who vote for a fascist are fascists themselves. This is straightforward: by voting for a fascist, you confirm your support of a fascist agenda.
3. Almost half of American voters voted for a fascist.

But even if you cavil at the idea of labelling tens of millions of Americans as fascist, you can substitute in “authoritarian” or “anti-democratic” and the effect is…

This is an article with a simple premise: the best in life is not for you.

I don’t mean this an an insult, quite the opposite. The best in life is a ruinous thing to get used to, and it costs way out of proportion to what satisfaction you’re liable to get out of it. Instead, what I’m advocating for you is Good Enough: the point where you can derive as much satisfaction as possible for as little time, money and effort as possible.

There’s a long-standing rule known as the 80/20 rule, with multiple meanings. 20% of the staff…

There’s a strange and ill-defined line that separates truly famous athletes from those who simply draw occasional attention.

Athletes like Tom Brady and David Beckham are still a big deal among people who don’t follow gridiron or soccer; even gymnastics has the superlative Simone Biles, whose dominance has been so total as to push her more or less permanently into the public eye.

But go beyond these sports, and you start finding people who simply don’t exist to the vast majority of the population even as they rack up records and superlatives. Darts has Michael van Gerwen, a treble world…

https://play.ht/articles/c500e1ad1f14

You’ve probably heard the statistic: 40% of Americans wouldn’t be able to deal with an unexpected bill of a thousand dollars. You’ve probably seen the recommendations: build up an emergency fund of three to six months’ expenses. It can be a daunting figure; for most of us, hitting that figure takes at least a couple of years of sustained effort, and so we frequently think of it as something distant or even unachievable.

I’m going to go out on a limb, though, and guess that you haven’t read about what really makes the emergency fund so useful, no matter…

The idea that a fertilised and implanted embryo is imbued with whatever makes us human at the point of conception is an idea which carries a lot of weight in anti-abortion circles. For a long time, it’s been treated as the starting point from which anti-abortion policies develop. It’s also been treated in most circles as a unprovable argument, something that properly belongs outside the realm of science.

However, it’s not outside the realm of science. “Is a one-minute-old embryo an individual human life?” is a question that can be answered clearly and decisively with the word NO. …

And, no, that headline isn’t an exaggeration.

First things first: an acknowledgement. I want to flag right from the start that the available research on this subject is, by virtue of a very small sample size, inconclusive. I can’t tell you with confidence that trans women definitely don’t have an advantage. What I can tell you is that anyone declaring they definitely do is almost guaranteed to be using one of the following bullshit arguments.

Argument One: “Fallon Fox brutalised Tamikka Brents in their MMA fight; it was a travesty of a sporting event; and it’s evidence that trans women…