Hypocrisy Rules

It's appalling that the tragic death of a man in Auckland who was stabbed after chasing a robber, is being used as a political football. 

The equally tragic death by stabbing of a Christchurch man who was out walking his dog is not attracting quite the same attention from the law and order mob.

The same people who mocked and derided Jacinda Ardern for "playing to the gallery" after the Christchurch mosque murders, are now praising her political opponents for doing the same over Janak Patel's tragic death, and they are lambasting the PM for not cancelling a trip to the Chathams to show due respect.

Say what you will about Ardern's politics, but I'll stand by my opinion that she's completely genuine in her empathy with, and sympathy for, all victims of violence.

I can't say the same about many of the political poseurs and opportunists who are helping stoke the fires of the current moral panic over rising street crime.

There's nothing more useful to the political right in the run up to an election than a moral panic – except several, mutually reinforcing moral panics.

It's a well established fact that socially conservative people tend to drift towards, and to be more accepting of authoritarian governance (or people who promise it) especially at times of heightened social uncertainty and personal anxiety. 

Media-inflated moral panics are a great way of ensuring high levels of both, and none more so than those centred around such things as violent crime, parental rights, and child abuse. 

If you can place an ethnic, or other minority at the heart of the moral panic, so much the better.

Janak Patel's death is an outcome of a set of social issues and problems that are far wider and more entrenched than the law and order tub thumpers have either the wit or the heart to comprehend, let alone respond to sensibly. 

This was an instance of horizontal violence, ie poor people robbing slightly more affluent people. 

Very affluent people with legitimate avenues of making money don't tend to rob little corner shops, or carry a knife and stab a worker who chases after them.

These small businesses, in terms of location, opening hours, staffing levels etc are vulnerable, easier to target and to rob than larger businesses. Their profit margins mean the owners can't afford sophisticated security measures, or to employ several members of staff which could be a deterrent,. 

A lot of those who are crying crocodile tears about the small businesses which are falling victim to horizontal crime don't give a damn about them in truth. If they did, they'd stand up for them against the giant corporates whose economies of scale force the likes of dairies into the sorts of opening hours and staffing levels that make them all the more vulnerable to being robbed by low level criminals.

For those who are minded to use this sad death to score political points, let me remind you of another time when a senseless, tragic death occurred as a result of a similar example of horizontal crime, and which was also used by a cynical law and order lobby. 

A pizza delivery man, was lured to an address where a group of kids waited to rob him. The kids were all brown-skinned and they ranged in age from twelve to seventeen. One of them hit the man with a baseball bat and they robbed him. He staggered back towards his vehicle, tried to get assistance from people in the locality but no one helped him and he died from a brain bleed. 

Utterly tragic.

Much of the NZ media gorged on the spectacle, whipping up rage among a population already in a state of heightened alert as a result of the efforts of right wing law and order lobbyists.

All the kids were charged with murder and the youngest became the focal point of a salivating media in what has to be one of NZ journalism's least edifying moments. 

Sensible and scientifically supported arguments in the kids' defence – eg they were not neurologically mature enough to fully understand the consequences of their actions; they'd been raised on a diet of television and video games in which people get whacked on the head with a baseball bat and are up and about immediately with little more than a few cuts and bruises – were waved aside. 

None of it resonated with the police, the prosecution, the courts, the media or with way too many of the NZ public, especially the racists.

The kids were cast as callous little monsters. People who, in every other respect, wouldn't have given the likes of Michael Choy as much as a passing thought, elevated him to the highest level of victimhood – not because they cared about him or others like him – but because by elevating him as a victim, they could all the more effectively diminish and dehumanise the kids whose reckless criminal action had cost him his life. 

This is obviously not a direct parallel as Janak Patel's alleged killer is a grown man but expect a lot of similar media overkill and cynical and politically opportunist tub thumping if he fits the law and order mob's template for a legitimate target. 

On Compassion

Some Sunday post-Twitter musings. 

Why do some women see compassion as a quality that has been imposed on them to ensure their compliance within the patriarchy or various forms of phallocracy? 

If women are indeed socialised into being more compassionate, surely that's a good thing and should be encouraged. 

If we shrug off female compassion as a mere outcome of patriarchal / phallocratic social relations – what are we saying about the quality of being human? 

Being compassionate and having empathy are human qualities; in a healthy society we'd all be socialised into them, and people who lacked them would be a cause for concern or would be ostracised. 

Could it be that it these essentially cooperative qualities have to be socialised out of people?

To me, the very essence of being human is the capacity for compassion and empathy – especially extending beyond your own ‘kind’ ie kin / ethnic group / religion / country etc.

It's an essential ingredient in the glue that holds people together in groups, and it's only in groups that we become fully human. 

How those groups function internally powerfully influences how they function externally. The dominance of aggressive competition within a group or society increases the likelihood of that group or society being in aggressive competition with others.

There's too much glorifying of the stereotypically masculine and denigrating of the stereotypically feminine in our world; it's what liberal feminism has capitulated to – the eulogising and reifying of some ultra-feminine stereotypes, especially related to appearance, combined with the uncritical adoption of some masculine stereotypes, especially related to aggressive competitiveness.

I can get as infuriated with the self absorbed, heedless machinations of social media influencers,  identiactivists and smug beardy-bros as anyone, and on a gut level I might want to punch them; on a more intellectual level I see them as products of a dysfunctional society. 

There has NEVER been a more dangerous time than this moment in history; never has humanity faced challenges on a scale of those we face here at this precise point in our existence as a discrete species. And such is the impact we have had on the planet, what adversely affects us also affects all other living creatures.

To hear a person I once admired hugely for his style of gentle, targetless humour (so rare in our world) talk about the 21st century as if it was a thing of which to be proud because he, now she, can be in permanent "girl mode", is a tad annoying. 

As is knowing that someone has become famous and hugely influential by donning the most crippling of gender straitjackets ...the ones that depict women as airheads and bimbos. 

Only narcissists and psychopaths fail to accept the fact that life involves a series of compromises. Properly socialised people accept there are a number of triaging processes going on, and sometimes someone else gets priority. 

All those who are lining up to fight for sex-based or for identity based rights need to ask, am I in this because I really care about vulnerable people?

Outside of pointing out and opposing the additional risk posed to those vulnerable people by malignant or vexatious actors, what have I done, what am I prepared to do to make their lives less vulnerable?

What would I be prepared to do and to give up to ensure poor, marginalised, abused people are better placed to protect themselves, to make their own choices rather than continue to be the objects of state aid or private charity? 

Tragic answer is, quite a few not only do sod all, they're not prepared to give up anything.

The rapidly widening schism in what had the capacity to be a re-energised women's liberation movement, has given rise to those who are on the political right and those who need justification for allying with it, referring to themselves not as feminists but as "femalists".

This is a forelock tug to the simple, if ingenious, marketing strategy of Posie Parker – placing the standard dictionary definition of woman onto a range of "merch". 

(I don't know about you but I find that word to be intensely irritating. Merch, schmerch.)

Honestly, can it get any more surreal? 

If you have no commitment to structural change, or if you are anti-trans in the sense of finding trans people to be unnatural and unacceptable, then I have to repeat, I'm not your ally.  

But, if you are so mired in your desire to be woke, or so fearful of being branded a TERF you refuse to look past the immediate issue to what's really at stake, I'm not your ally either. 

Someone recently accused me of sitting on a burning fence; I prefer to see myself as having climbed a small prominence nearby in order to be able to keep a better eye on the antics of both extremes. Of course, being stuck up there also makes me an easy target for both. 

Ho hum.

Yet more matters ideological

Still on the identity politics theme, which is getting increasingly hard to avoid on both social and mainstream media, and breaking news for those who claim there’s no such thing as a transgenderist ideology, there is in fact a set of beliefs about the state of being transgender, which are characteristic of a group – ergo an ideology. 

These beliefs are usually presented on social media in the form of memes and mantras, and in mainstream media, in opinion pieces and articles that are often poorly-researched and one-sided.

These beliefs include: 

• Biological sex is not binary, it is on a spectrum, and the existence of the range of disorders or differences of sex differentiation is appropriated to support that claim.
• Gender identity is innate, or develops so early in development, it might as well be.
• Gender identity can also be fluid.
• People who are born male, even those who make no medical or appearance changes are, if they so declare, to be regarded as adult human females, legally and socially, and vice versa. 
• Any negative impact on current sex-based rights which exist to protect women and girls, or to counter-balance historical or current sex-based disadvantages, is deemed to be either non-existent or insignificant in comparison to the advantages accruing to transwomen of being fully included in the category of women or adult human female.
• To be inclusive of the tiny minority of transmen who still menstruate, or who want and are able to conceive and go through pregnancy, and so as to not emphasise the inability of transwomen to menstruate or to gestate new life, the terms associated with all aspects of being reproductively female, must be made gender-neutral. Hence terms like pregnant people, menstruators, people with a cervix, gestational or non-gestational parent, human milk, chest feeding, etc should be used. 
• Terms like biologically or genetically female or male must not be used.
• It is literally possible to be born in the wrong body, ie there is such a thing as a female brain in an otherwise male body, or vv.  
• At a more metaphysical level, there can be a female or male essence/ soul / spirit  inhabiting a male or a female body.
• Misgendering (ie use of incorrect third person pronouns) or dead naming (using a former name) should be designated as hate crimes. 
• It is possible for a three-year-old to know they are transgender, and appropriate for such a chid to be socially transitioned.
• If trans kids are not allowed to delay puberty chemically, they will kill themselves in alarming numbers. (1)
• Puberty blockers are harmless, or any harm they do is analogous to chemotherapy for childhood cancers.

And so on – a number of beliefs that constitute an ideology in the current sense of the word, and many of which are also ideological in the archaic sense of the word – ie visionary speculation of an unrealistic or idealistic nature.

In the 1980s – as neo-liberalism was poised to send the social and natural worlds into a tail spin from which both may never recover – a social contagion swept the anglophone world. 

Large numbers of people – many in  positions of authority – believed absolutely in the existence of a giant, global conspiracy of satanic child abusers. This drew together some very unlikely bedfellows such as the police, religious fundamentalists, and some radical feminists – and spread its tentacles into the corridors of governance. 

The evil-doers who were the focus of that moral panic were both male and female, and deemed to be literal immolators of children. Most of the victims of the moral panic were ordinary people, many of them parents, caught up in the hysteria. 

Most of the witch hunters and the vigilante mobs unleashed by them were not remotely interested in changing society foundationally in order that all children might be protected from all forms of abuse. They were in the grip of a weird form of bloodlust that demanded – and got – sacrifice. There are some who are still in its grip.

In this current era – which is a tipping point for neo-liberal capitalism and may well herald a rapid descent into some form of overt authoritarianism – there is a current social contagion, a wave of a fervent, almost blind-to-reason belief in the immutability of gender identity. It is ostensibly in defence of transgender people, and widely seen as progressive, ergo a phenomenon of the left. 

The witch hunters of this movement are both male and female, but it's the former who tend to be the most aggressive and domineering in pretty much all facets – who’d have guessed?

The designated evil-doers are TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) who are deemed to be the worst enemies (the hyperbole even extends into them being literal killers) of trans people, by being the primary instigators and transmitters of transphobia.

Trans people are depicted as uniformly weak and vulnerable and in need of protection – even those who gained (and retain) all the physical, social, and economic benefits of being born male, middle or upper class, and white.

Although there are men involved, in the mind's eye of the social media mobs, TERFs are female – and not just female – white, middle-class, feminist females. (2)

If these mobs, and the mass of institutional fellow travellers, were all in pursuit of a permanent change in the social and economic base of the world that was aimed at benefitting all people, if they were removing and disposing of the behavioural straitjacket of sex-role stereotypes – their fervour could be applauded – but mostly, they’re not. 

Mostly they're in the grip of a social contagion, or they are displacing their own disquiet, transferring their intense emotions from one sticking point to another. Or they are – not to put too fine a point on it – moral and political cowards. 

The TERF has become gender identity obsessed progressives’ social media scapegoat – rid the world of the TERF, and all will be well. 

Of course, most of them know that it won't. They know there'll still be racism, poverty, war, femicide, rape, economic and sexual exploitation, the annual holocaust of needless deaths of small black and brown persons, and all against the backcloth of a looming, multi-faceted global ecological disaster, but they can shelve all that while they're doing the work of the virtuous in silencing the Terrible TERFs.

It would be funny if it were not so destructive and divisive.

Notes:

(1)  An almost inevitable consequence of delayed puberty is multiple, major surgeries to change the body, and a life time of cross-sex HRT with attendant medical surveillance and testing regimes because of increased risk of cancer and of metabolic organ damage. There is also the hugely vexed question of whether, without such medical intervention,  some – possibly most – of these kids would become lesbian or gay. 

(2) This should also be considered in relation to another rising phenomenon - blaming white, middle class women for - well,  just about everything.

Essence vs appearance

I'm getting hesitant about dipping my toes into the gender identity piranha pool but to me what matters about this ideology is its incredibly divisive and polarising nature – which is well demonstrated in this Facebook thread.

 Of particular note in the thread is the unedifying spectacle of biological determinists accusing the other side of being biological essentialists, and people roping in the complexities of differences of sex differentiation as proof of the assertion that gender (learned behaviour) is in fact innate whilst biological sex ­­– the foundation of species reproduction – is on a spectrum and mutable and can and should be changed as far as possible to align with a subjective, empirically unverifiable sense of an individual gendered self. 

 

Essence is in a battle to the death with appearance.

 

In my view, the current gender identity orthodoxy has been and still is accommodated by neo-liberalism and its compliant governments and NGOs precisely because it is idealist, individualistic, and divisive of the broad left. 

In truth, GI is a key player in NLism’s drive to break up all mass collectives which might threaten its economic dominance, and it has proved to be the perfect bandwagon for the west’s large numbers of useful idiots in search of a trendy cause. 

Gender identity ideology and its praxis breaks populations down to the level of a bespoke and subjective individual sense of gendered identity; reaggregation into small groups occurs and is tolerated and even promoted but only as long as those groupings pose no threat to the economic status quo. 

 

Anyone who refers to gender identity activists as being far left is ill-informed, or so far to the right they’ve either tipped over into a state of unreason or are at imminent risk of doing so.The primary source of support on the left for the ideology and its attendant praxis comes not from the old red left, but from the politically exsanguinated neo-liberal left which has given up on achieving foundational change and makes itself feel virtuous by filling in some of the superficial cracks in an inherently inequitable, grossly exploitative, and unstable system. 

 

Many on the neo-liberal left are in fact so comfy in the managerial / academic / technocratic roles they occupy, or anticipate occupying, they’re blind to how tactically dumb it is – in a world teetering on the edge of a perfect storm of natural and social disasters – to risk driving impoverished and anxious people into the waiting arms of the right. 

 

All those who are now crying about the alt-right leaping on the gender identity rights versus sex based rights issue need to ask whether, had trans activists not ridden rough-shod over sex-based rights, would there have been a backlash for the right to coat-tail and exploit?

 

Eg. why did TAs not lobby for additions to language to acknowledge and accommodate gender non-conforming people instead of a seemingly arrogant insistence on replacing language that was inevitably going to piss off large numbers of people, help further erode confidence in the left, and expose trans people to ridicule and aggression? 

 

And before anyone winds up the virtue sirens, replacing breast feeding with chest feeding, vagina with (the truly execrable) front hole, mother with birthing parent, menstruating women with bleeders etc is not the same as challenging sex and race stereotypes in language. 

 

Attacking arguably the most foundational of human beliefs about a material reality that cuts across sex, class, race, age, and in what is often a heedless and at times embarrassingly dumb fashion, was always going to result in a backlash. 

 

Like many of the older left wing feminists involved in all this, I was agitating for the destruction of the gender straitjacket decades before gender identity became the trendy issue du jour, and I’m frightened for all those who stand to be harmed when the political pendulum swings back and acts like a scythe. Gender critical feminists who are on the right or those who are prepared to ally with the right on this one issue, who think that scythe will somehow miss the sex-based rights they're fighting to protect, need to think again.

The last iteration of divisive and diversionary politics on the left helped usher in NLism. Given what may follow corporate capitalism could well be barbarism, people need to stop arguing over how to treat a headache when the patient’s clearly at risk of dying of sepsis.

 

On Schisms And Who Benefits From Them

I’m from a working class background, and I owe everything I have and am to a window of opportunity that opened up for working class girls and women in the west, post WW2. 

That window has not just been slammed shut, it has been bricked up, and a trompe l'oeil painted on it to fool people into thinking it’s still there and any failure to get through it is their own fault. 

I started this year determined to move past the issue du jour – gender identity – and widen my focus. I failed, and recently a thing I've been gloomily predicting for some time has come to fruition – social and political ultra-conservatives have coat-tailed feminist concerns about the effects of gender self identification on women's sex-based rights, and a schism has opened in the movement.

Some seasoned feminists, as well as women new to feminism, have been persuaded that entering into an alliance with people who are their nemesis on every other issue, is both essential and sensible because gender identity is more immediately threatening than anything else – even the terrifyingly obvious threat of several converging social and natural crises, each capable of causing a global catastrophe.

Some people, on what can usefully be described as the left of Neo-liberalism (NLL), and with utter predictability, have seized on the now openly acrimonious schism within what has become known as “gender critical feminism” (GCF).

For those who don't know, GCF is a default name for various sorts and degrees of opposition to the “gender identity” movement and its political orthodoxy.

A straight-talking, spirited woman in the UK, who "boldly channels her inner Monroe", has emerged as a somewhat unlikely leader of a single-issue coalition which now ranges from radical lesbian separatists and radical feminists, to people who are on the political far-right.

A clever marketer, and unashamed populist, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull  (aka Posie Parker), has used the issue of gender self identification, with its negative connotations for women's sex-based rights, as a base on which to build an influential platform.

 

Seemingly oblivious to the part they have played in the rapid progression of this over the past five years, the NLL can’t resist having a dig at those left wing feminists who have been labelled as “gender critical” but who would and will not countenance entering into alliance with the far-right on this, or any other issue, and whose approach to gender (as in sex stereotypes) is to want to destroy it.

 

The schism runs along an older fault line and was inevitable but the NLL does not get to slide out from under its culpability in all of this.

 

In the UK, labelled "TERF Island" by TAs, the NLL leapt on gender identity as an excuse to divert away from the myriad and pressing feminist and traditional left wing concerns such as poverty and the life expectancy of poor working class girls dropping for the first time in a century, plus what anyone with half a political brain can see – the rapid advance of right wing authoritarianism globally which will hit women first and worst.

 

The NLL's preparedness to drop even the pretence of a commitment to class politics, and to declare gender identity to be the "preeminent human rights issue of the era", is to their eternal discredit. 

 

The NLL –  or people purporting to be leftists – have in fact helped KJK to build her platform by pushing socially conservative women to the political right via such unedifying tactics as calling them “deplorable cunts", or "Nazi adjacent,".  If not actually stooping to telling dissenting women to “suck my big fat trans cock”,  they defend or fail to challenge the almost always pseudonymous accounts which do so.

 

From where I stand, there’s a depressingly small number of mainly left wing, principled women and men who have held the line that gender identity is, and always was a diversionary politics, and a part of wider and more dangerous movements aimed at weakening the broad left, in the service of global corporate capitalism.  

 

When did capitalism ever actively promote a movement which so much as threatened its profits, let alone its existence?  What other movement in the history of opposition to entrenched power has been so rapidly and enthusiastically embraced by the capitalist power nexus and its governmental and NGO helpmates? 

At best, the gender identity movement is accommodative politics; at worst, it’s among the most divisive ideological weapons capitalism has ever deployed.

 

Both the political principles and the praxis of gender identity politics were always going to provide fuel for the right to use to whip up fear and anger among the vast ranks of the socially conservative.

 

And sorry, all you white leftists and actual or would-be social trangressives, but socially conservative people are not just vast in number, they cut right across class, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, and yes, even gender identity. 

 

Make them feel really threatened, and you've turned up the heat under the mother and father of all moral panics. Even in a more stable world that would be dangerous; in a world in a state of growing social and natural disequilibrium, it's reckless beyond justification.

 

                                                                     * * * * 

On both the extremes of this most polarised and polarising argument are those who, for a variety of reasons, see it as the single, maybe the only issue that matters. 

Gender critical feminism is a single issue movement which attracts a cross-section of feminists who see gender identity ideology and praxis as a major threat to women's sex-based rights, and to lesbianism. Within the ranks of the feminists involved in this, the essential divide for me is between radical, socialist, and liberal feminism. 

Very broadly and simplistically, the first is female-centric and locates the oppression of women within patriarchal arrangements, and its political priority is destruction of  the patriarchy. The second sees the liberation of women as a prerequisite of, and dependent on the liberation of all, and the third focusses on formal rights and parity with male peers within the existing socio-economic order.

Although she allies with radical and lesbian feminists, Posie Parker is neither a lesbian nor a radical feminist; she is purely and solely against gender identity ideology, and if she's any sort of feminist at all, it's a liberal feminist.

 

She now talks about the failures of left wing women to hold back the tide of transgenderism over the period since the “dead cat” of Gender Recognition Act reform was dropped Into UK politics by Tory spin doctors. 

 

That’s the time she’s been building an increasingly populist platform, which she is now using to turn women against other women – some of whom have spent ten times that long working tirelessly for women’s and wider rights.

It's hard not to see her as anything other than sectarian; or an opportunistic bandwagon jumper who has dragged her supporters into covert and overt alliances with the political and religious right in pursuit of a perilously narrow political aim. 

At best, she's well meaning but too narrowly focused; at worst, she has slipped into being (maybe always was), a tub-thumping, rightwing populist and ideologue who's using this issue to divide women, and to demonise the entire left, including left wing feminism. 

 

That narrow focus serves only one set of political and economic interests – and it’s not the bulk of women, and it’s not the working class.

 

She’s not saying – “Let's unite to fight this one manifestation of Neo-liberalism as a priority, and use it to build a vast movement to tackle all the other issues that are grinding vast numbers of people into the ground, and threatening the entire planet".

What she's saying is – “Stopping people with a penis saying they're women and invading women’s spaces is the only battle that matters.”

 

In that, she has become the polar opposite of the other extreme of the gender identity divide which claims – "People with a penis are female if they say they are." 

 

A key difference between KJK and the gender identity radicals is most of the latter at least pay lip service to some older left wing priorities.

 

Any working class woman who thinks KJK will take a stand against Tory austerity measures; any woman of colour who thinks she'll stand up against racism; any disabled woman who thinks she'll stand against the iniquities of an unravelling welfare system; any lesbian who thinks she’ll stand against the far right when it turns on the wider LGB population – needs to wake up.

 

And anyone who thinks any of this sectarian division is remotely good for anyone outside of the economic elite and those it deems to be currently useful, needs to think again. 

 

The ruling class and its helpmates have spent centuries perfecting their divide and rule tactics. In over half a century of various forms of left activism, I’ve never seen anything quite as divisive of the left as this – or as useful and timely for those whose pappy, manicured hands are on the controls of the economic train that’s about to take us all over the edge of a precipice.

 

This isn’t a game or a drill.

 

 

 

 

A Frenzy Of Self Righteousness

>> Crude emotional blackmail / marginalise and demonise / woke indoctrination / activism / garbled and overheated report / hit job / flagrant misuse of power / attack on free speech / malignant / woke code / ambushed / ego-driven / naked and explicit abuse of power / threat to free speech / patronising / threatening / hubris-afflicted media. <<

 

These words and phrases are all from a recent blog post.  What major issue drove the writer, Karl du Fresne, into such a frenzy? 

It was a bizarre claim by former Radio NZ journalist and wanna-be shock jock, Sean Plunket, that the Christchurch mosque murders were not an act of terrorism but were committed by a “lone nutter with a gun". Furthermore, the killer's manifesto did not prove he was motivated by political aims, ie Islamophobia, and the government's framing of the killings as terrorism was politically motivated.

 

Du Fresne acknowledges the obvious fact that Plunket got it woefully wrong on the question of the killer's political motivation, but claims Plunket “said nothing that minimised the enormity of what Tarrant did”. 

Furthermore, reporting Plunket's comments on Newshub’s 6pm news bulletin, was a “naked and explicit abuse of power”, a “threat to free speech” and to the very foundation of our democracy from a “hubris-afflicted media”.

Not content with defending Plunket's decision to nail his colours to that particular mast, du Fresne also goes along with the claim that the framing of the mass murder as an act of terrorism was politically motivated, and he indulged in a fit of hyperbolic character assassination of the political editor of Newshub, featuring the now de rigeur accusation of being “woke”, aka politically correct.  

 

What Plunket has done, according to du Fresne’s logic, is not to offend and distress the Muslim community by making the sort of claim usually only heard in the bowels of the internet, but merely to express a legitimate, if incorrect, opinion.

 

Without the ability to express such an opinion without fear of being held to account, he warns us darkly that the very foundations of our democracy are at risk. 

 

Frankly, even if all Plunket was guilty of was bad journalism - ie allowing his personal opinion to change the widely agreed facts of a story, it would be worthy of comment by others in the media. 

 

Whether he did it for publicity for his news platform, or to provoke a response he could use to claim to be a martyr to wokeness, or to cosy up to those sections of the far right which also deny Tarrant’s ideological motivation – it is not just worthy of journalistic comment, it demands it, and the media would be remiss not to report it.

 

It is disturbing if these two seasoned journalists can genuinely not see how their comments minimise the enormity of the act. It is even more disturbing if they are engaged in the very thing they accuse the government and Newshub of doing – making political capital out of mass murder.

The motivation of the murderer does not make the victims any less dead or harmed but there is a political and personal difference between being a tragic victim of circumstance by being in the line of fire of a deranged gunman, and being deliberately targeted and gunned down by someone who hates you for being who you are. 

 

That difference matters hugely to the survivors, and to the families of the dead and the wider community which was so targeted. It should matter to all of us.

 

I might agree that Plunket has the right to make such claims, I also agree that others have the right to call him a poor journalist, an insensitive oaf, or a crude, right wing dog whistler for so doing.

 

 

 

 

Political White Water

The NZ Herald recently published a highly ideological piece posing as fact-based journalism about a facet of the now common process of trying to achieve systemic and ideological shifts by a process of policy and regulatory change by stealth, ie change sex-specific language related to reproduction, to being “gender inclusive", so as not to exclude or distress transgender and non-binary people who give birth.

Among the population of trans men,  ie natal females who are so uncomfortable with their sexed body they’ve had, or want to have "gender affirming" surgery or change their sex hormone ratio to male levels of androgens, there is a tiny minority who clearly have a sort of selective or partial gender dysphoria which allows them to come off androgens and restore female levels of oestrogen in order to be able to conceive and to gestate a foetus for nine months.

Such people have the inalienable right to be treated with the exactly the same degree of care and respect as all women should be afforded, and if it makes them feel more at ease and included, we should use terms that are acceptable to them.

However, we all need to take account of the fact that trans men with selective gender dysphoria are a tiny minority of the minority of what is a very small minority in the wider population, so to risk provoking the mother and father of all socially conservative backlashes by effectively trying to force an unpopular change on the overwhelming majority, seems a tad lacking in strategic nous.  

The obvious question of course is: why did trans ideologues and activists not start with a demand to add on trans-specific terms rather than try to force through what was always going to be seen as a form of erasure, and potentially unpopular among a large number of people from across political parties, class, age, culture…

We should support those trans men who are able and want to carry a baby,  but not in a way that effectively erases such words and phrases as “mother”, “maternity”, “woman” & “breast feeding,” because that way lies the Charybdis of extreme social conservatism which can and will swallow the identity canoe in an electoral heartbeat.

It'll probably be fine for those in the canoe who are wearing life jackets, but a lot of people might metaphorically drown. 

Given this issue (along with sports and paediatric transition), has already provoked a conservative backlash, it seems daft to make it worse by trying to hide strategic ineptitude, moral cowardice, and political opportunism by blaming women who object, and labelling them as TERFs, and then declare TERFs to be Nazis.

That’s politically infantile and will serve to intensify the backlash and further stigmatise the Left.

The simple fact is, in order to change incredibly deeply entrenched beliefs, you have to be armed with extraordinarily compelling arguments and evidence, not rely on claiming to be "on the right side of history", or guilt-tripping people.

And, of course, the fact that we haven’t seen a similar change by stealth in the language around men's health and parental roles speaks volumes. 

Well, it does to those who are prepared to listen.

I'd not take issue with a process of policy changes by stealth if I believed it was for the greater good, but in respect of trying to persuade people that it's both fair and reasonable to dispense entirely with "feminised" words and phrases relating to reproduction – well, I’ve always seen some big political rapids downstream of that, and as the gender identity canoe is being paddled by people who are clearly incapable of reading the water, it probably won't end well. 

The Reds V the Whites

Where to begin? At the beginning is always a good place for a logical thinker like me. 

A while back, a fairly high profile, privileged young Marxist railed on Twitter against the  “cunts” who oppose identity politics – arguing that they should get involved in the movements and make the case for a materialist, class-based theory and praxis.

My feeling at the time was, “Back at you, Bub; social media polemics aside, what more could you have done to give the dying left wing a much needed political and critical blood transfusion?”

There’s no doubt that neoliberalism has wiped the floor with the left, ideologically and strategically. It has managed to discredit Marxist economics and historical materialism, and replaced it with the incoherent muddle of monetarism and post modernism. 

It has routed the old red left and replaced it with a politically and theoretically anaemic doppelgänger – dubbed by the Chinese as the white left, which I suspect is not about race, but about the traditional political enmity between the Reds and the Whites.

The white left is not "left" in any traditional sense of the term which is precisely what the drivers of anti-Marxism and anti-collectivism wanted. 

Having been infected with a form of pernicious political anaemia which renders it incapable of mounting a serious opposition to the corporate-driven status quo, be that ideologically or politically, all the white left can manage is support of issues which, objectively, pose no real threat to that SQ.

Neoliberalism tolerates, even promotes, the white left and its political theory and praxis, for the simple reason that its political and critical essence is so diluted, it does not remotely threaten NL hegemony; quite the reverse, it strengthens it by appearing to be an opposition. Its usefulness lies in helping maintain the illusion that there is a political opposition, the existence of which is vital to the maintenance of the appearance of democracy. 

In the US,  there is literally very little to choose between the blue and red parties. The Democrats in the old South were the party of racism and reactionary politics; Democrat administrations and Presidents at best have merely tinkered with peripherals and at worst have matched the GOP's imperialist misadventures. It was a Democrat President who signed the order to drop nuclear bombs on civilian targets.

it's the same elsewhere. The bellicose CEO of NATO Inc is a Labour politician. A key player in the destruction of Iraq was a British Labour PM in league with a US Republican President. Jacinda Ardern is not a traditional socialist, and labelling her as a Marxist is an ideological meme created by the right.

Many people on the right who describe identity-based politics as  left wing, or even “Marxist”, do so because they haven’t a clue what either actually are.  

They are told by right wing ideologues and commentators that a movement, which is based on an empirically unprovable and individualist sense of a gendered self, is Marxist, and not knowing any better, they believe it. It  would be funny if it wasn’t so serious in its outcomes.

In essence, the white left is largely middle class, numerically dominated by white men, and in terms of theory and praxis, dominated by a form of identity politics which grants an apparent hegemony to people of colour, and the ever-expanding and increasingly meaningless LGBT+ aggregation.

The key words are apparent hegemony. Let those communities combine and adopt a class-based analysis of, and opposition to the corporate elite, and start calling for structural political and economic change, and watch the iron-fisted essence emerge from the rainbow-hued velvet glove.

The professional-managerial strata from which the WL draws most of its members and support, has expanded as a result of, and benefitted from the Neo-liberal "reforms" of the past 50 years.  

A lot of people who are described as being left wing these days are not left wing in any meaningful sense of the term – they’re simply not overtly right wing, in other words, they’re centrists. What is more, a lot of them are the sort of political flip floppers who will fall whichever way the political wind blows or the tax cut and pay rise flows.

That the coordinating class objectively adds little value to the lives of the mass of people  is well-known to the more politically astute of them, which may be why so many of them flock to the virtual barricades in defence of trans rights. It makes them feel better about their essentially parasitic existences, and helps them to ignore and to justify ignoring the vast and growing mass of those who have already fallen into the abyss, or are teetering on the edge of it. 

Identity politics – as it is currently framed inside the imperial bubble – pretty much does Neo-liberalism's bidding by largely ignoring class and stripping sex and race down to the level of the individual, and it abides by Neo-liberalism's rules that only those re-aggregations (in the form of interest groups) which serve its purpose are allowed.

We all know that if the current iterations of identity politics posed any sort of real threat to the economic SQ, they’d be destroyed in a heartbeat. Instead, they’ve served a useful ideological and tactical purpose in these increasingly dangerous times, in not just dividing and diverting the broad left, but when it suits the suits, they will be used to demonise it. 

We can already see how transgenderism is being used in parts of the US – and is being used, typically less overtly, here in NZ – to fuel a moral panic among social conservatives, including women. 

Make social conservatives anxious, especially about what they believe to be universal absolutes, and they are more likely to move towards the open arms of the political right which is better organised, funded, and armed than the left.

How are we to mount an effective opposition to the emergence of these counter-extremes, which common sense suggests will not stop with those tiny areas of gender identity that have butted heads with women’s sex-based rights?

I keep using the analogy of a political and critical cul-de-sac in which the left has allowed itself to be kettled. The simple answer is, unless we ALL turn around, break out, and realign along lines our economic masters desperately don’t want us to, we’re all toast.

The End Point

In chemistry the “end point” is the point in a titration at which a reaction is complete - often marked by some sort of visible change. 

In social chemistry, sex self ID may be seen as the end point of the hyper-individualisation and the denaturing that sits at the very heart of capitalism. 

To me, the “identity over material reality” issue is an outflow of an essentially individualist and individualising ideology which – in the service of globalised corporate capital –  is aimed primarily at destroying left wing collectivism. Not the interest-based politics of the white left, with its inherently unstable coalitions, but the class based interests of the red left. That remains capitalism’s main enemy. 

Capitalism is essentially malign; it deforms and destroys; it shoves people into straitjackets, it is chewing up the entire planet faster and excreting more shit than ever, and it has learned how to defend itself by turning its opponents against each other. 

This has never been more clear than in this current iteration of divide and rule.

The ruling class have long known how easy it is to use ideology to divide and dominate any opposition, and social media has made their job easier than ever. 

The ideology is the velvet glove; inside it remains the iron fist of the state machine working in the interests of the ruling class, aided these days, by the coercive agencies of the deep state, and by private militias. 

From the acorn of interest group politics, the tree of identity politics grew, protected and fertilised by various agents and agencies that don’t give a toss about the ever-proliferating groups clustering around various forms of identity.  

They want, above all else, to divide in order to continue to rule. 

To that end, they want any nascent opposition to be, from its embryonic form, already primed to break into competing interest groups. 

If those interest groups are in pursuit of something which also creates markets, so much the better. 

If, by pushing for sectional interests, these groups encroach on others’ interests, and thereby create divisions between natural allies, even better. 

“There is no society, there is only the individual and the family” – thus spake Thatcher in advancement of Neo-liberalism, tacking the family on as a sop to religious interests. 

The whole idea of the “self” – the stand-alone individual and her/his social and legal rights – was a product of capitalism. And like other aspects of capitalism, there is some good in it.  But humans are ineluctably social, and stripped of natural community, we either fall into an utterly dysfunctional and harmful isolationism, or we create our own communities. 

In the modern era, inside the imperial bubble, that’s now often a virtual community, sometimes centred around a subjective, empirically unverifiable, and shifting, sense of self. 

It’s a spin doctor’s / agent provocateur’s wet dream. 

The aims of the ruling class first were to destroy the dream – ie the very belief in the possibility of structural/systemic change – and one of the main planks in that strategy was to attack and discredit Marxism and all that was informed by it. 

Post modernism was not just tolerated by the agents of the ruling class, it was actively promoted for its capacity to undermine Marxism.

At the same time, they sought to destroy the means by which the dream of a better world could be effected, ie the mass collectives which are the only way the powerless can wrest power from the ruling class.

They have done so, and continue to do so both by undermining and discrediting any collectives which look like becoming mass movements – left wing parties, trade unions, and other anti-capitalist collectives; and by promoting hyper-individualist and individualising ideologies which spawn inherently competitive factions.  

This has never been more clear than in this current iteration of divide and rule.

Sex self-ID is not a coherent, overarching conspiracy; it’s the result of a set of ruling class, interest-based objectives. Sometimes those interests overlap and coalesce and cooperate with each other.

The individualist identity interests of billionaire cross-dressers and trans-humanists co-exist for the moment with those of the US-centred global military-industrial complex, but they would be sacrificed in a heartbeat if the real power saw a financial or a strategic advantage in, for example, fully unleashing the pit bulls of the far-right.

What those feminists who argue that sex self ID is the preeminent issue confronting women, need to realise is, the pit bulls won’t stop with trans people. Trans people may become the first victims but they sure as hell won’t be the last. 

The far more wide reaching danger is that sometimes the handlers underestimate the pit bulls’ capacity to turn on them.  When that happens, we see the full horror of barbarism. 

There is only one line of defence in the world today, and that’s the old Red Left. It’s also why it remains the primary target.

 

 

 

 

Crises

We have a cost of living crisis in New Zealand.

Basic foodstuffs, housing, fuel etc are getting beyond the reach of the low waged, whose numbers and levels of desperation are increasing. 

We have a deepening political divide.

There is a growing impatience among a wide range of working class people with what is perceived to be an affluent, urban, liberal elite mainly employed in well paid, white collar, government or corporate jobs, who are investing energy and political capital in what are seen by many people as fringe issues. 

We have trade unions seemingly more concerned with being the C21st equivalent of politically correct than addressing the causes of their loss of influence and relevance, and with that, their ability to protect their members’ foundational employment rights. 

We have a growing health crisis in New Zealand. 

If you’re poor in NZ, your chances of dying earlier/unnecessarily are far higher than if you are affluent, and that’s getting worse. 

There are massive waiting lists in public hospitals for treatments of all sorts. Where I live, if you need an urgent ENT appointment it could be several weeks before you get one. If you need a hip replacement, unless you have insurance/can pay privately, you could wait in extreme pain and with limited mobility for years. If you are a menopausal woman and need to see an endocrinologist – even privately – there's no chance. 

Doctors use chemical cudgels and blasts of radiation to treat some cancers wherein the side-effects of the treatment are often worse than the disease, and even getting timely access to that is now a postcode lottery. 

Emergency departments in cash-strapped public hospitals are struggling to deal with those who are being failed by largely privately owned primary health provision.This week, in Auckland, a woman died of a brain haemorrhage because triaging failed in an over-stretched emergency department. A couple of years ago, a man dying from liver failure was dumped at a bus stop by hospital staff in Christchurch.

We are lagging behind the rest of the OECD in lots of areas while doctors in private practice are coining it.

Globally, there is a widespread capitulation to forms of unnecessary medicalisation, eg, to enable a transwoman to experience breast feeding, doctors prescribed a drug which is contraindicated for pregnant and breastfeeding women because of possible adverse effects on the foetus/newborn. 

Clinics in the USA provide so-called sex nullification surgery or other forms of appearance-altering procedures to bring the body into some sort of approximation to a person's sense of self as being of the other sex, of no sex, or of another species.

Lupron, a cancer drug, is used off-label to treat central precocious puberty (CPP) because it delays sexual maturation. Despite evidence of longterm harm from that use, for the past decade or so, it has been used off-label, to suppress puberty in kids who believe they are transgender.

This is part of a much wider and deeper social/political malaise which is building to a crisis point, but the actual numbers of transgender kids affected by the so-called, Dutch Protocol, at the moment is very small.  

Far greater numbers of children are affected by a global explosion in developmental and reproductive disorders and childhood cancers. Alongside a global drop in sperm quality over the past 50 years, there has been an increase in CPP which studies have linked to endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, especially in agriculture/horticulture. 

We live in a chemical soup, and immature bodies are more powerfully affected by that than mature ones. To add to this environmental chemical cocktail, powerful drugs, used off-label and with as yet inadequate evidence as to their long term adverse side-effects, is something that needs to be approached with the greatest possible caution. 

No one, and especially children, should be exposed to massively invasive and lifelong medicalisation unless it's absolutely essential. 

Trans-ideologues and activists have played a huge role in persuading/enabling/ forcing medical professionals to reach for these off-label drugs and the scalpel to treat what is, objectively, a suddenly emergent, and rapidly growing epidemic of sex-related unease and anxiety among kids and adolescents, which manifests especially among girls, many of whom have pre-existing co-morbidities. 

The big issue with this for me remains – kids who go on the trans-medical track, way more often than not, stay on it, which means being exposed to:

the as yet unknown long-term adverse effects of puberty suppression, followed by

the forcing of a counter-puberty with synthetic cross-sex hormones, followed by

the very high probability of multiple surgeries to remove pre-pubescent primary reproductive organs, and to refashion genitalia, followed by,

a lifetime of medical treatment (ongoing cross-sex hormones and testing for metabolic organ and cardio-vascular health) and the accompanying state and/or corporate surveillance. 

The well-documented adverse effects on sexual pleasure aside, because immature gonads will not produce viable gametes, most of these kids will be rendered sterile.

That’s a massive price tag which MAY be reasonable in some instances but there are some spectacular twists and leaps in logic and ethics needed to justify in all cases.

It's Just A Joke

How a person handles great power and influence is the greatest test of their character.

Humour in a profoundly stratified world is seldom politically neutral. 

Humour which relies on taking the piss out of any given demographic, is never politically neutral.

Humour can be a powerful weapon in defence of the powerless; it can also be used to strengthen power – directly and indirectly.

Rickey Gervais’ trademark is pushing the boundaries of acceptability – taking “edginess” to the extreme.

He uses his humour as a weapon, and he uses his working class background to justify a style of humour that is essentially just a laddish, “taking the piss”. 

He mocks religion but he’s also capable of being mawkishly sentimental. 

Although he's mildly self-deprecating, he never takes the piss out of himself to the same degree as he does others, ie he hurls his barbs at pretty much everyone other than himself. 

I suspect he has always used his sharp wit as a defence. People back off because there’s nowhere he won’t go – nothing he won’t say, no weakness he won’t exploit. 

His humour is an extension of the adolescent style of humour which gave rise to:  “Mummy, mummy, why do I keep going around in circles? Shut up or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor.”  

Or the legion of Biafran jokes back in the day which made me cringe long before PCness made people stop and question the role that sort of “humour“ can and does play in diminishing social problems, and/or reducing others’ humanity.

We ALL have things we can’t find funny and which we may actually find profoundly hurtful or offensive – jokes about burying a baby being a case in point.  

In a world that remains homophobic and in which we know the far right is making big strides, how defensible is the “risk” Gervais took with the crass and unfunny AIDs joke? 

Or the way he mocked gender identity which totally relied on laddish “cock” jokes. 

This is not a sophisticated defence of women’s sex-based rights, it’s a piss take of men who identify as women. 

I also ask - why now? 

Why did Gervais back off when the TRAs challenged him a couple of years ago, but suddenly he’s emboldened? 

Why is Netflix suddenly enabling it?

Why is Bill Maher suddenly on the anti-genderist bandwagon? Ditto Chappelle?

A black man finds a cache of deeply offensive material in an all-male and white, uniformed workplace where he’s covering a vacancy. He reports it.  It includes such things as a picture of a starving black child with the caption “Greedy little wog bastard.” A picture of an elderly black victim of a gang rape captioned, “Be gentle with me, boys”. A pamphlet from a rest home captioned, “Piss-ridden old hag” and “Your cunt smells like rancid shit”. And loads more.

How far are some of Gervais’ “jokes” from those men’s ideas of what was funny?

I get dark humour; I understand it can be a way of coping with hard, dangerous, and shitty lives, and it can also serve to forge bonds. 

But when you are also living a hard, dangerous, and shitty life, maybe one that’s objectively worse because you are black, a woman, old, gay, or disabled, and you are the target of that sort of humour, or when the bonds being forged are ones which exclude you, even harm you, it’s not funny. 

To then be told to lighten up or be told it’s his right to be offensive – can we blame people for being angry?

I find Gervais’ humour often to be so laddish, as a woman, I don’t relate to it. I don’t feel Gervais is setting out to be an ally to women; if he was he’d have done what Graham Linehan did and put his career on the line at the off.

Did the group of men who wrote that vile shit referred to above, and who all thought it was funny, have the right to do so?

How about the senior officers who minimised it by saying they’d “seen worse on the walls of rugby club locker rooms”? Did they have a right to their opinion? 

Not one of those men were bothered by how that black officer felt, or were concerned by the fact that the workplace happened to be a stone’s throw from where a black lad was beaten to death by racist thugs whose crime was covered up by a racist police force, or that those men were supposed to be public servants, protecting the very people they were busy taking the piss out of.

Humour can be a scalpel - in the right hands it can delicately peel away layers of hypocrisy and bland acceptance to reveal essential truths; at the other extreme it can be a cudgel used to coerce or to bludgeon selected others into silence and submission.