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.