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Again though as IP points out, trans individuals are just as likely to face the same sort of treatment and attitudes from the police, if not worse.  So the debate and rhetoric do a fantastic job of dividing two groups that share much in common with regards to discrimination and inequality.

Keep in mind that the entire 'gender critical' movement is a construct of the American Christian right. They felt they'd 'lost' the battle on gay rights (particularly marriage equality) so they re-grouped and specifically picked out trans rights as a 'wedge' issue they could use to re-open the door for a whole bunch of their regressive policies. Make no mistake, if they 'win' on trans rights, they're coming for gay rights immediately afterwards.

(Although, the noises coming out of the US Supreme Court these days suggest that they can probably skip this entire step in the States, since an assault on women's rights is already well underway, and Thomas, at least, has his eye on allowing states to recriminalise sodomy.)

So is there a case for advertising bans for alcohol?

Quite possibly, yes. Booze companies tend to use the same argument that the tobacco companies used: that advertising is to encourage brand switching,* not to entice people who don't drink into starting. That's probably as much bollocks now as it was when the tobacco companies argued it.

(Let's be honest, any industry that's taking cues from the tobacco industry playbook is almost certainly lying.)

* I don't think I've ever chosen one brand of alcohol over another due to advertising, apart from my early twenties when my choice of cheap draft lager (the primary aim being to procure the largest volume of beer for the least amount of money) could be swayed by whether I was enjoying the Fosters, Carling or Heineken ad campaigns the most at any given time. Even so, a difference of 10p a pint between one or the other in the same pub was more than enough to override any fondness I might have had for Paul Hogan, or whoever... :-)

Again, I hate to be that guy, but calling Rowling a bigot is defamatory and untrue.

Rowling has explicitly stated that she regards the definition of women as "people who menstruate" and that's not even true of people who were born biologically female and identify as such. She's tweeted links to a site selling merchandise with explicitly transphobic slogans. Under her (somewhat loaded) Galbraith pseudonym, she published a book about a male serial killer who dresses up as a woman in order to murder women.

Whilst, on the spectrum of TERFery, she's not at the most extreme end, she absolutely does have form in this area.

(This is neither an endorsement of, nor justification for, any form of harassment or threatening behaviour.)

There is no answer to this, given how subjective the question is. It's like asking "What's the best colour?"

Right now, I have (scurries off to check) 1512 active fonts installed on my system. I like some of 'em better than others, but they all have their uses and even the unattractive* ones will sometimes be exactly what a design calls for.

*Unattractive to me. There are objective metrics by which a font can be judged 'bad' (the terrible kerning in Comic Sans, to pick a famous example) but, beyond that, it's all a matter of personal taste.

I tell you what if this carries on I'm going to scrap all the votes that have gone before, start again and we'll do that until you all get it right!

Democracy in action! ;-)

Wow. A couple of draws have surprised me, but to see the (IMO) terrible Mean Team hold up against Firekind (which, I'll concede, is not Smith's best work and shines largely due to great Marshall art and because it ran in the company of some terrible strips in the prog at the time) is genuinely baffling...

Don't get me wrong — I'm not slating anyone for liking what they like, but I'm just, well, surprised that a chunk of certainly-not-terrible Smiffy is getting a run for its money against a complete pot-boiler that Wagner/Grant bailed on after the first series. Anthologies, eh...?

Many thanks Sheridan. Much higher than I thought - I was expecting under 100k copies. I'm guessing the subsequent issues then dropped off a little.  Where did you get the 220k number from?  Cheers.

2000AD routinely sold around the 100,000 mark through most of the '80s.* Given that it was full sale-or-return back then, I'd expect the print run to have been double that. Launch issues tend to be higher still — there's no point in spending advertising money if there's no product in the newsagents for people to buy. I wouldn't be remotely surprised if the actual print run was considerably north of 250K for the first few issues (and by no means all of those 'returns' would have been destroyed/pulped).


* It had dropped back to maybe 70-80K during the Burton/McKenzie years, before a distributor change around 1990 knocked another 20K+ off that overnight and (IMO) the combination of reduced availability and the fact that the comic just wasn't very good sent it into a death spiral of haemorrhaging sales until Tharg's assistants John Tomlinson, then David Bishop, then Andy Diggle, all made some fairly herculean efforts to at least stabilise the sales figures. Andy ascended to the Right Hand of Tharg pretty much on the day the deal to sell the 2000AD group to Rebellion was inked, then handed to the reins to longest-serving RHoT, Matt Smith a couple of years later... and that seems to have turned out OK. ;-)

"Seb Coe Sportsplex" - that's got to be it!

It definitely is. Google image search doesn't turn up a scan of the money-shot, but it ends with Dredd facing off against a huge mutant whose hide is so tough it's basically bulletproof, so he turbo boosts his bike off the diving board (the bike responds to this development with Shark's remembered "Thanks a bunch!") and into the mutant's chest.

Wasn't there one where Dredd jumped off his Lawmaster mid-turbo-boost, leaving the bike to plummet to destruction, and the bike says something like "Thanks a bunch!" Or did I dream it?

Same story, I think.

He's since said his timing is probably wrong but that he strongly remembers Dredd using his bike to spear the big EOLM baddy.

Isn't that the single episode 'Firepower' by Ennis and MacNeil?

(Prog 736, Case Files 16, according to Google.)

As I saw someone observe elsewhere on social media: Clarence Thomas' insistence on referring back to the supposed intent of the original framers' of the Constitution in the 1700s would preclude his seat on the Supreme Court entirely, because he would still be regarded as property, not a person.

I'm genuinely unable to process this.

As straightforward as they come this one.

To be fair, notwithstanding the little-loved Defoe In Space! last book, it's unquestionably the better thrill.

Although it's nice to John Allison get a look-in here, I think Tackleford is both too far west and little far south...

But with double-length episodes, so that the two-parters were equivalent to a four-parter in the 20th century show.

The length isn't relevant to the point, though, which was the relative absence of multi-parters in the Who revival, because the target demographic doesn't like 'em much.

- The revived Doctor Who proved that there WAS an audience for a family adventure tv series ( And the dwindling of viewers can't just be down to the advent of catch-up but must be because it stopped targetting that audience).

Although you'll notice that, in the revival, the four- or six-parters that were common in the previous era were jettisoned in favour of mostly done-in-one episodes with the occasional two-parter.