'What next for Ukraine's captured soldiers' says the BBC. (Was that supposed to be a question?)

Well, I for one cannot believe the "neo-Nazis" of the Azov Battalion are going to be treated very much better than the Russian soldiers who've been captured by the Ukrainians.

But at least the Ukrainians are upholding the Geneva Convention. Right?

Why is grooming OK if you're gay?

Why are gays allowed to get away with grooming?

If this pervert had been straight the police would have woken up to what he was trying to do, gone round to his place, kicked his front door in, ransacked his home, and confiscated all of his hard drives "as evidence"*. (They then wouldn't have looked at them for at least six months, but that's not the point. Let's face it, just the opportunity, every now and again, to rough up a suspected nonce is the reason most coppers sign on. After all, it's easier than trying to catch burglars and murderers.)

One possibility of course is that under the sacred rainbow umbrella it's still the case that pretty much anything goes. It's a politically and culturally sensitive area, and so unless you're a Tory/Muslim/MP/all of the above, they're likely to give you a wide berth. No cop with brains and ambition wants to be accused of "homophobia" in 2022, and any super with brains knows it.

I suspect the "deeper" answer though is that "it's different for men" - which of course means it's different for boys. Men, so the implication goes, cannot be victims of sexual assault in the same way that women can. Touch a woman's knee on the Underground and you're done for. Touch a man's and no one will bat an eyelid: commuters in 2022 don't like being called "homophobes" any more than the rozzers do and, more to the point, men are supposed to be able to look after themselves. (Even more to the point, we're talking Marxist power dynamics here: white people can't be victims of racism†, men can't be victims of sex crimes††.)

Quite simply, it's the old Victorian double standard alive and well. Pace L P Hartley, the past is not a foreign country. As far as sex crimes are concerned it's still very much with us.

And it's coming to your little boy's Catholic school any moment now.

UPDATE: He's also an anti-Catholic bigot. Quelle suprise!

With @Thejfschool saga continuing, time to take a closer look at the author at the heart of it all: @simonjamesgreen. Was his sexually graphic rewrite of the Lord’s Prayer just misunderstood? Should Catholic schools have to promote his work? Must @RC_Southwark apologise? A 🧵 1/

— emitte lucem tuam (@elt01461) May 18, 2022

(And a sicko! Meh!)

*And in all probability they'd have found it too. There's rarely any smoke without fire.
†Tell that to the Poles during WWII - but bearing in mind that as far as Whoopi is concerned even "the Holocaust" wasn't "racist". (It wasn't about "her people", so it wasn't really a thing.)

††Most rapes take place in men's prisons: most rape charities are run by women. Don't ask me how that makes sense.

All Right on the Knight

Seen it all before? Maybe! Light then dark then light - like the Bonds? I suppose so. But you didn't realise that angry Batfleck (of the Snyderverse, no less) was the light version until what came afterwards. (Ditto Brosnan! Everyone thought he was a "serious" Bond until Craig came along.)

Batman as Zorro? Bit odd! Thomas Wayne as villain? Ditto! But at least there's a sense here that Hollywood is now coming down from its (anti-Trump) woke high of a couple of years ago. (How exactly you make feminist fantasies like Aliens and T2 even more woke-feminist was never clear - and it wasn't a good idea.)

Gordon's been race-swapped, which makes him feel at worst like the black Felix Leiter from the Craig Bond films and in practice no worse than Danny Glover in the Lethals. And so the handsome rich English public school boy World's Greatest Detective gets to whitesplain batsplain things to the poor black gumshoe. If this is woke, I suspect they didn't think it through. 

And Catwoman is now black too, again! But then no one minded Eartha Kitt back in the '60s, and this one more than exorcises the memory of Halle Berry. (And obviously one minded Harvey Dent being black in the Tim Burton Batman, but then that was probably because he was played by Billy Dee Williams - proof that back in those days race-swapping could actually make you cooler.)

All-in-all, it's good to see the Caped Crusader back on form. Most of the boxes get ticked, the grunge-emo look works well (and the sound!), and the moral complexity of Joker has survived into a "mainstream" series. Yes, there are disappointments. (No Justice League! No Wayne Manor! No Robin - duh! And de facto no Alfred either!) And the chances are that after all the Schubert and the Fauré (not to mention Vengeance's own "Fasolt and Fafner"-type leitmotif), as well as the beautiful night-time visuals, you'll be nodding during the last half-hour (when - spoilers! - Bats singularly fails to stop the villain's dastardly plan to flood Gotham City and turn it into a literal crime-infested swamp).

But it could have been sooooo much worse.