Our thanks to Francis for this. Just the latest in a long line of such cases, stretching back decades. Women are ruining men’s lives, or trying to, and the courts won’t punish them, thereby encouraging more women to do the same. Once again, the ‘immaturity defence’ is employed, as too often for women… and only women:

Defending lawyer Adrian Chaplin said: ‘She is a young [note: 23] and immature women who stupidly and selfishly got involved in a wholly inappropriate flirtation on the eve of her wedding.’

I don’t think I’ve ever heard oral sex described as ‘flirtation’ before.

Our thanks to K for this. Excerpts:

The court heard Patrick poured her husband about two-and-a-half glasses of the spiked drink on Christmas Day 2013.

When he became ill the next morning she phoned the ambulance service and told them the alcohol had caused his previous kidney failure to “flare up again”. When ambulance staff arrived his wife of more than 25 years handed them a fake “do not resuscitate” note, the jury was told. [my emphasis]

Mr Patrick spent several days in an induced coma before having to learn to walk and talk again during a year of rehabilitation, having already survived an earlier attempt by his wife to kill him the previous October. [my emphasis]

The court heard Mr Patrick had not wanted to pursue a case against his wife and daughter and did not want to see them put in prison.

In a statement he said: “I will never get over it. It broke me. I’m just a shell now. This was a person I was married to for over 25 years. A person I loved and love.”

In mitigation, Julia Flanagan, for Katherine Patrick, said her client had been ‘physically chastised’ by her father as a child and became ‘overly reliant on her mother.

Let’s try a gender switch on the last sentence, shall we?

In mitigation, John Flanagan, for Douglas Patrick, said his client had been ‘physically chastised’ by his mother as a child and became ‘overly reliant’ on his father.

Somehow I can’t see a defence lawyer uttering such an incredible statement in the name of ‘mitigation’ for a man in similar circumstances.

If you haven’t already seen Alison Tieman’s excellent short video on the difference between men’s and women’s moral agencies, it’s here. To be fair, it’s there, even if you have seen it.

We’re delighted with the number of people who have already pre-registered for ICMI16, but it’s clear from conversations with people, that many are unaware that if they don’t pre-register, they might not be able to attend the conference.

A link to the conference announcement is here. You can pre-register (it costs only £22.00) here, using PayPal or credit/debit cards, before the deadline of 22:00 GMT, 6 December. Please email me (mike@j4mb.org.uk) if you experience any difficulty making a payment.

We plan to book a venue with a capacity slightly above the number of people who pre-register, so if you want to be sure of attending ICMI16, you need to pre-register.

Key points:

1. The fee will be refunded in full if the conference is cancelled, or a substantially smaller conference planned. The fee will be deductible from all ticket prices including the Early Bird Discount (£225.00), otherwise it will be £265.00.

2. Pre-registration places you under no legal obligation to buy a ticket for ICMI16.

3. Depending on the size of the venue, which is itself dependent on the number of pre-registrations, only those who have pre-registered by the deadline will be assured of a place at ICMI16, and only if they have booked and taken up one of the three payment options for their conference ticket by 22:00 GMT 31 December.

4. We are planning to make this a ticketed event, and don’t plan to sell tickets during the conference.

5. Surplus tickets will go on sale on 1 January.

6. It is important that you do not book travel or accommodation until a final decision has been made that the conference will proceed, and announced on this website.

I urge you to pre-register as soon as possible, to ensure your place at the conference, and to guarantee its financial viability. Thank you.

A final point. Some people have expressed concern at the cost of accommodation in London. In the coming few months we’ll be investigating options for lower cost accommodation, e.g. student accommodation, or hotels further out from central London with good transport connections (including minibuses), and publishing details on this website.

Best wishes,

Mike Buchanan

Along with many others, I’m a huge fan of Carl Benjamin, a 36-year-old British vlogger from Swindon who publishes material under the pseudonym Sargon of Akkad. You can hopefully appreciate how deeply distressed I was, when it recently came to my attention that he had described me in one of his videos as boring. So I thank Rod for pointing me to the latest SoA piece, This Week in Stupid, in which he retracts this slur (15:45 onwards).

Sargon of Akkad will be attending ICMI16. Pre-register now – only £22.00 – or you might not be attending the event. You can do so here. Pre-registering does not commit you to buying a conference ticket.

Outstanding. A tip of the hat to both Janice Fiamengo and Steve Brule, the videomaker. The video is 15 minutes long, and at 13:15 Janice makes some comments on York University’s decision not to recognize IMD.

Janice Fiamengo is a professor of English at the University of Ottawa. At the second International Conference on Men’s Issues, to be held in London next July 8-10, Janice will be talking on, ‘How Feminism is Destroying Higher Education’. Details of the event are here. Demand for tickets is sure to be high, so we urge you to ensure your place at the event by pre-registering – only £22.00 – before 22:00 GMT, 6 December.

Yesterday there was a good turnout of J4MB supporters and others backing Men Do Complain in protesting against MGM. As the light was starting to fade, Richard Duncker took the photograph above, of some of the protesters, next to the Churchill statue. He’s currently editing a video of the event, and we’ll publish it as soon as it’s available.

My warm thanks to everyone who turned out on a cold wet afternoon. Hopefully you’ll agree that the money spent on (weather-proof!) placards was money well spent. The quality of the leaflets – donated by a commercial printer – was excellent.

Good news.

A tip of the hat to Peter Lloyd for this.

Three weeks ago John Barry, a psychologist, gave the first lecture of the Gender Equity Network. Extracts totalling 13 minutes are here. The introduction is made by Belinda Brown, a social anthropologist whose work we’ve covered before, some of it on the website of The Conservative Woman.

We’ve just published on our YouTube channel a 43-minute-long video of Philip Davies MP introducing the first-ever parliamentary debate on men’s issues, held in Westminster Hall yesterday, International Men’s Day. He put in a stellar performance, all the more so given cynical attempts at disruption by feminist MPs (one of them a man). We’ve added some background underneath the video, and links to materials including the Hansard transcript of the full debate.

Philip is nothing less than a hero to people concerned with men’s and boys human rights. He’s the only MP (of 650 MPs) who speaks on behalf of half the electorate. The other 649 are relentlessly fixated on the wants and needs of women and girls, as articulated by radical feminists, regardless of the impact on men and boys.