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.