A con of the first water

The Neo-lib inspired management-governance split left local councils in New Zealand in the grip of central government by making party political divides in local governance opaque, by placing too much power in the hands of CEOs, and by imposing layers of regulation almost all of which have to funded out of rates, which residents pay out of their taxed income and on which they are then taxed again by central government via GST.

Back in the colonialist days of powerful provincial governance, some people longed for a strong central government to curb the untrammelled greed and rampant self-interest of those who controlled the provinces. 

We live in an era in which those venal, self-serving attributes are firmly in the driving seat at all levels of both the governance and the management of a socio-economic system that is rooted in exploitation in pursuit of private profit. Calls for more local power in that socio-economic landscape are a chimera.

As a case in point: I live in a district with a population of just under 14k in a land area of 8,600 square kilometres. Our rates have skyrocketed, not solely because of the abandonment of Three Waters but because of decades of poor management and governance.

We have water which meets WHO standards but due in part to a council strategy of mixing water from different sources (funded by the last government), our water is so heavy with minerals and chlorine it destroys water heaters and whiteware unless softened and filtered as most people are now forced to do at their own expense. 

The reticulated rural water supply is old in places, and leaks are frequent with untold amounts of potable water being wasted.

The bulk of the district’s roads are unsealed and poorly maintained, due largely to the inefficiencies and false economy of the Neo-lib contract culture in which local councils are firmly enmeshed. 

As a rural property we were forced to install a sewage system which, thanks to the regional government's subservience to the Neo-lib ethos, requires on-going maintenance, initially by the company which installed it, then by a large corporation which bought that company which now out-sources the job to a self-employed contractor. 

We have no rubbish collection, and the council effectively destroyed one of the country’s most advanced and innovative community-led recycling initiatives to pass a key contract onto a private sector provider. When questioned about what was widely perceived locally as a conflict of interest, the then mayor laughed and said, “This is XXX, there’s always a conflict of interest.”

All that aside, NZ’s total population is half that of Seoul. It is skewed, not just in relation to the numbers in the northern island, but in greater Auckland. 

The larger island (also the location of the great, state-funded hydro schemes which supply 60% of the nation’s now privatised electricity) is home to just 1.2 million people, half of them in one province. 

There is a pressing need for governance and management to be genuinely efficient and economic,  and to be responsive to local needs. We simply cannot afford to have deep layers of both national and local governance and management. 

The creation of the all-important buffer zone, the various strata of which have a financial and  status stake in the economic status quo, has resulted in layers of bureaucracy which are all-too often parasitic on essential front-line services. 

This is at its most obvious in the public sector, and at present it provides useful ideological cover for a crackpot coalition government to make swingeing cuts in the sector –  partly as a bone to divert some of its more rabid supporters, but mainly to fund the juicy steaks it intends to serve up to its main financial and political backers.  

They point to the layers of bureaucracy that their ilk created as a buffer zone, and to the struggling, front line service providers who have been starved of funding and ham strung by regulations, and they sacrifice some of the former, not to improve the latter, but to divert the “savings” into the pockets of the already-rich. 

Or, even more brazenly, to create new layers of bureaucracy to facilitate yet more asset stripping. 

It is a con of the first water; unparalleled in its callous impudence.

Gamesmanship

On the NZ left wing site, The Standard, an article written by a woman about the fairness and safety issues implicit in the presence in women’s boxing of two athletes who may / probably have a 46XY disorder of sexual development or differentiation (DSD) of the sort that grants them some degree of androgen-related performance advantage over their 46XX opponents, prompted a response from a man.

The heading and the tenor of the second piece was guaranteed to trigger the, now usual, heated debate about the implications for women’s sex-based rights of gender-identity related shifts in legislation, policy, and procedure.

 

Even though the debate was largely measured in tone, it resulted in a threat to the very existence of the site, and then to the original article being removed. 

 

It’s not appropriate to speculate about the reasons for the threat to close the site being issued, but the invariably intemperate responses swirling around the questions of sex versus gender identity, and specifically, gender self-identification by statutory declaration, may have played a role.

 

Transgender and intersex issues do not overlap usually but the inclusion of the latter in the ever-increasing number of groups jostling for position under the transgender umbrella, means that some people don’t acknowledge any difference. 

 

The problems inherent in this lazy conflation are exemplified by the likes of JK Rowling, Donald Trump and Elon Musk weighing in on the women's boxing.  It was a rerun of the furore when Caster Semenya of South Africa, Margaret Wambui of Kenya, and Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi took the medals in the women’s 800m at the Rio Olympics. All three athletes were found to have had an XY karyotype and to produce levels of testosterone in the male range, with no definitive evidence of how much their bodies benefitted from it. 

 

The resulting controversy saw the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) now World Athletics, impose a differential standard for athletes with male levels of testosterone, which affected African athletes disproportionately. That in turn provoked a storm of protest which led to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) developing a broad framework for fairness, safety, and inclusion within which the various international sporting bodies would develop their own rules for eligibility. 

 

It is worth stating that only the female category in sports is at issue; men's sports are not in any way affected by these fairness, safety, and inclusion issues.

 

There can be no doubt there is a wider geo-political back cloth to all this in the claims of corruption and ties to the Kremlin swirling around the International Boxing Association (IBA) ie the US-led boycott of the 2023 IBA world champs; the formation of World Boxing as an alternative body, in competition with the IBA; the IBA’s disqualification, mid-competition, of the two boxers on the grounds of having an XY karyotype; the removal of the IBAs Olympic accreditation, and the IOC decision to set up an ad hoc committee to run boxing which allowed the two IBA disqualified boxers to compete.

Both swept through their weight grades with unprecedented 5-0 wins in all rounds.

 

Many of the women in the sport of boxing are likely to be on the high side of the standard reference range for female levels of testosterone. On average they are tall for women and are physically tough, and the women at the Olympics will be the best in their respective countries. 

Either Lin and Khelif are both atypical in respect of their physical abilities in the sport, or they possess an androgen-related performance advantage in the male range. 

 

The rise of Islamophobia and the far right across Europe, the specifics of the experience of Algerians when it was a French colony and as migrants to France, all form a backcloth of which the likes of JK Rowling should have been aware.

 

I never expected any better from her because before the issue of sex self ID hit the political fan, she threw her considerable  weight and influence behind the anti-Corbyn faction in the UK Labour Party, and she is a firm ally of Israel. It would have been more surprising if she had refrained from inflaming the situation.  

 

Some people who comment are simply not au fait enough with the issues; some are angry for a wide range of reasons which I have written about extensively – albeit polemically – on this blog, and some of them are engaged in various sorts of divisive and diversionary behaviour. 

 

Without re-entering the ring to engage in further ideological fisticuffs, I will just say that the bottom line for me is as it has always been, we must be able to address these and related issues in a way that doesn’t demonise people who are caught in a geo-political shit storm not of their making. We must avoid division, and diversion of time and energy away from more important issues. 

 

We must also remember the reasons why those who rule us encourage people to obsess about obscenely expensive circuses like the Olympic Games. 

 

I thought the Paris games would be a focus for attention grabbing protests about such issues as Gaza and climate change but if any happened, they didn’t make global headlines. 

 

The brave individual gestures made by athletes to try to get the world's focus onto what is happening across Africa, in Afghanistan, Palestine etc were obscured by an obsessive media and public focus on one person competing in a fringe sport. 


 

And that was not the fault of one side only; it takes two to politically tango.

 

I will not readdress the issues of transwomen’s participation in women’s sport as this is a different, albeit linked issue. 

 

As I try to see all these issues through a wide political lens, for me, this firestorm Illustrates why it’s so important always to pull aside the ideological veils to see if there is anything sinister lurking behind them. 

 

With regard to DSDs and how a decent society responds to people affected by them, the individual’s rights to privacy, to personal dignity, to wider formal tights, and to timely treatment when needed, are a given. There should be no debate. 

 

There are formal, codified rights and informal social rights which are embedded in the social compact. The two don’t always neatly align and sometimes they clash.

 

Neither sort of rights is absolute, as sometimes one set of rights affects others. Also, all rights carry with them a range of duties and obligations to the wider collective. 

 

Social life is a series of compromises, and as we live in world riven with structural inequalities, some people are forced to make endless compromises whilst others, the rich and powerful usually, get to float through life making hardly any. 

 

People with DSDs are not a “community”; there is huge range of types of DSD, some of which vary widely in how they present. They were lumped together under the non-scientific descriptor of “Intersex” for political lobbying purposes because historically many people with DSDs had been treated shamefully by the medical establishment. 

 

Within medicine the attitude was, and remains in some countries and cultures, that if a neonate does not have a normal looking penis and scrotum, s/he should be made a girl, legally and if available, via forms of surgery and drug treatments. 

 

Being crisscrossed by wider social factors like religion, by parental rights and expectations and the rights of the infant/child etc, it is not an easy terrain to navigate.

 

Sometimes these days in the developed world we settle on doing only that which is needed to ensure health and well-being, waiting until the person is old enough to make their own informed decisions. 

 

In some societies, parents don’t have that luxury.  Living inside the imperial bubble we forget the grimmer realities of life for impoverished people, especially women.

 

Our self-congratulations on how progressive we are in the way we now see the wide range of DSDs, rings hollow if we fail to ask whether those conditions are increasing in incidence, range and/or severity, or is it merely the fact that they are now being diagnosed more easily and more often?

 

There is a range of political movements that are aimed at normalising pathologies. All too often, the so-called progressive left fails to ask the obvious question when that normalisation is enthusiastically embraced and even enabled by corporations and powerful corporate-compliant institutions. 

 

The first question to be asked is whether these processes of normalisation help to obscure causal factors which are attributable to those corporations and institutions.

 

There is a global increase in childhood cancers, and in developmental and reproductive disorders. 

Microplastics have been found in all organs in humans, including the brain.

 

Clinical obesity was once uncommon in young people and morbid obesity was once rare in adults; it is now commonplace, especially among the poor.

 

Type 2 diabetes was rare in adults and unknown in children; it is now commonplace and appearing frequently in kids.

 

The range of triggers and incidence of life-threatening allergies has increased, as have rates of autism.

 

There is a global drop in sperm quality and an increase in reproductive cancers and conditions like endometriosis.

 

Kids are entering puberty younger, and the incidence of central precocious puberty is increasing with links to the presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment.


 

If we fail to draw aside the ideological veils that we surely all know are used to obscure causal factors directly attributable to profit-hungry corporations and their compliant, enabling governments, we are aiding and abetting the culprits. 

 

Normalisation of the pathological is a widely used ideological veil that is made opaquer when the component of human rights is added to it.

 

Autism becomes something to celebrate as neurodiversity, aka being on the spectrum. 

 

Clinical and even morbid obesity become just normal variations in the amount and distribution of adipose tissue, and any attempts to examine it as a pathological response to metabolic triggers are deemed to be fat-shaming orfatphobic. 

 

DSDs become evidence of human reproductive diversity, or proof that sex is not binary leading to such risible claims as there being 5 or 6 sexes. 

 

Call me a cynic but every time I see attempts to normalise the pathological, I want to investigate further. 

 

Several decades ago, I was drawn into researching endocrine disruption in horses. I was seeing mares with the equine equivalent of polycystic ovarian syndrome; obesity and patterns of grossly abnormal adipose tissue; hind gut disorders leading to catastrophic tissue failure in the hooves; unusual neurological conditions. 

 

There were lots of explanations about why, all pretty much missing the herd of tap-dancing elephants in the corner of the room which included the ubiquity of endocrine disrupting and DNA damaging chemicals in the environment. 


 

Studies which draw a link between EDCs in agricultural chemicals, like a study linking CPP to agricultural EDCs in rural France, once languished in the dark or were dumbed down by that part of the coordinator class which is employed to put an ideological spin on scientific studies for public dissemination via a compliant media.

 

These days there is a critical mass of data about these chemicals – some of which fall into the category of “forever chemicals” because of the time they persist in the environment – so the issue is becoming better known.


 

However, the vast petro-chemical industry responsible for their manufacture, and the various industries which use them, won't suddenly grow a conscience and say "mea culpa" and clean up its mess, so it's up to us to keep shining a light on these issues, and keep demanding answers. 

 

Science strives to be neutral in its methodology, but it has always struggled to be genuinely neutral because research needs funding, and with funds, be they from corporations, governments, foundations etc, come with strings. Those strings define not just what will be studied but also what conclusions are drawn, how the data is presented publicly and to what use the findings will be put. 

 

This is never truer than in the Neo-liberal era in which corporate funders often dictate the subject and scope of scientific enquiry.

 

So, whenever I see processes that seek to normalise pathologies  which appear to  have the laudable aim of benefiting people, but which actually benefit hyper-capitalism, I get edgy.

 

We should always bear on mind that anything which divides people, which distracts and diverts political energy and focus away from the causes of these existential threats is very likely serving the interests of the people who created them...for profit, solely for profit.

 

On Matters Ideological

I've spent arguably far too much time on the topic of the gender identity orthodoxy. If there is a justification for that focus over the past few years, it is that it touches me personally as a woman; and, as a socialist feminist, I'd have to be a saint not to be resentful of the ways that some people, purporting to be on the left, have treated women like me for daring to have an opinion which differs from their doctrinally approved viewpoint.

I'm not interested in the political-critical equivalent of duck shooting when it comes to the ways in which the religious and conservative right have co-opted facets of what came to be known as “gender critical feminism.” My focus has always been and remains on those whose interests are being served by it.

My start point is, any theory and praxis deserving of the description of feminist is inevitably critical of gender, in that feminism analyses and seeks to change the sets of historically and culturally specific beliefs which, in order to subjugate women, are wrapped around the biological reality of reproductive sex. 

Gender has its roots deep in the bio-social realities of species reproduction. 

As a species, we are not powerfully instinctually driven in relation to reproduction, which allows us to be highly adaptable. It also makes us highly reliant on learning.

Given how vital learning is to us, and how highly social we are as a species, it may be that the social rites and rituals early humans wrapped around reproduction were an important part of the learning how to be female and male humans which reinforced relatively weak instinctual drives. Not so much straitjackets binding people into a certain role in production and reproduction, but guides to what was of greatest benefit to the survival of the collective.

The nature and purpose of the rites and rituals, and the beliefs which gave rise to them, and which they reinforced and perpetuated, changed profoundly with the emergence of forms of rigid social stratification characterised by the rule of men.  

“Gender” became ideology, patterns of belief that underpinned behaviours which protected the interests of property-owning or property-controlling men – those who became a ruling class.

The ideas of what it means to be female and male, with the latter always occupying the dominant place, were set in stone with the rise to prominence of monotheist patriarchal religion, but they were by no means confined to it. Patterns of male dominance existed in pantheistic societies also. 

The progression from animism to pantheism to patriarchal monotheism were moves from an acceptance of an essential complementarity between the sexes to extreme expressions of male dominance in which women's reproductive and productive capacities became the property of men. 

At its most extreme, even her personhood became an extension of the male – as father or husband or lord, and ultimately, God.

The most binding and enduring chains on a person are the chains of the mind, especially if they are donned willingly or better still, are not even recognised as chains. In that the role of religion in granting divine approval to male temporal rights cannot be over stated, and it is why in the modern world, the resurgence of forms of fundamentalist patriarchal religion is a major threat to women.

It’s stating the feminist obvious that the way gender as ideology and praxis develops and is perpetuated, differs considerably across historical eras, ethnicities, cultures, classes, and ages. 

Failure to account for those differences and how they impact the women most affected by them, invariably weakens feminism, and what weakens feminism, weakens all other progressive movements.

For convenience, I work with a broad distinction in the schools of thought which influence feminist praxis – liberal, radical, and socialist. 

The former confines itself almost exclusively to gaining parity with male peers within the existing social-economic order. It sometimes sees the liberation of women as being the adoption of stereotypically male behaviour and/ or in accepting the extreme gender stereotypes of appearance and behaviour demanded by men. It morphed into choice and corporate feminism which are a product of Neo-liberal capitalism.

Radical feminism overlaps with socialist feminism and differs from it primarily in how it conceptualises the origins of male power, which in turn influences what is seen as the solution to it. 

Radical feminism places the patriarchy front and centre, and at its most extreme, it posits an essential and therefore unresolvable conflict between the sexes. This involves an acceptance of an almost Nietzschean notion of a male “will to power”, a drive to dominate others which was and is enabled by greater average male aggression and strength. 

These views lead to ideas about separatism or at the most extreme, the pipe dream of revenge in the form of a reversal of the subjugation of women by men.

For socialist feminists, especially Marxists, the liberation of women is inextricably tied up with the liberation of all, which necessitates a change, not just in the dominant ideas and the superstructure, but in the economic base of the power which historically has been held by the males of the ruling class. 

Within capitalism that is the bourgeoisie which exists in sometimes uneasy alliance with the remnants of the older, feudal ruling class. In the capitalist era, that was and largely still is, European men, although it is shifting. Unfortunately for women, it is just shifting from one set of male hands into another.

Patriarchy, as a matrix of ideas and practices, is an ancient and a formidable opponent which has used every means at its disposal to entrench male power – from overt and brutal coercion, to ideologies which draw a legitimating line from man to god.  

The ideological is always preferred because it is so much more efficient and effective when people don their own chains, or justify the wearing of them as being god’s will or nature’s way, but the brute force is always there in reserve. 

You have only to look at the hordes of misogynists on-line to see how ready and willing large numbers of men are to blame their feelings of powerlessness and all facets of their miserable, abject lives, on women, and who fantasise about the use of force to restore the illusion of power which women's rights appears to erode.

That some women have always colluded with men to gain some measure of power, or sought to appease men by wrapping themselves in patriarchy’s chains was tragic; that women in the era of mass communication actively choose to do so, is closer to farce.

This is apparent in that noisy battleground where the gender identity war is being fought. When new forces entered the fray from both the secular and the religious right to reinforce the Gender Critical Brigades, many of the original GCB withdrew, refusing to be in alliance with the right. 

Those who still remain, seeing the far right now lining up with them, are faced with finding ways to justify being in alliance with forces they must know will turn on them in a political heartbeat.

To do so, they have to cast the transgender enemy into the single biggest threat facing women. 

In the context of Palestinian rights versus Zionist colonialism that means siding with the latter because Islam is seen as the greater threat to women.

It is almost beyond comprehension that these noisy, attention-grabbing, opposing forces remain intent upon the destruction of the other at a point when all sane persons know the natural world is in crisis, and the social world, which has created that crisis, could tip at any point from a precarious state of relative equilibrium, into the chaos of barbarism.

There is no excuse for it in this world of instant information. The blame for the failure to widen our own focal lens lies with each of us. 

It is terrifying that the minds of some people are so fixed on the “enemy of the moment”, their eyes will glide past all the misery and horror and the naked brutality of the wider world, and focus solely on images which fuel their hatred and fear of that single enemy.

They expend all their energy digging their well of rancour and disgust even deeper to justify their promotion of that single enemy to the ranks of the worst ever; to make that single enemy so evil, so destructive, all other battles must be put on hold in order to destroy it…even the battle for the survival of the planet as we know it.

They will ignore or justify wars in which the dead and the permanently scarred are overwhelmingly non-combatants and mainly women and children, and ignore famines in which the victims are overwhelmingly women and children.

These are people in the grip of a Samson-psychosis; they will risk destroying it all in order to defeat the detested "other".

If I was religious, I’d say, God help us. 

Punch Bags

Without entering the realms of speculation about the medical history of the two individuals at the heart of the Paris olympics' women’s boxing debacle, there are some pertinent facts about the sport of boxing in general that people should bear in mind before deciding on which ideological hill to make a stand.

Women’s boxing was first introduced into the summer olympics in 2012. From 2016, professionals were allowed to enter and the same year the requirement for male boxers to wear padded head gear was removed on the grounds that padded headgear does not decrease concussion risk. However, women still have to wear it. 

The weight and style of gloves are controlled. Female boxers must not be pregnant, and they are required to wear breast protection because getting punched in the breast is not only potentially very painful, especially during menstruation, it is potentially damaging to long term health.  

Male boxers wear groin protection, and punches below the belt, or to the kidney region or back of the head are proscribed for both sexes.

The reason that women are still required to wear head gear may be more for face and ear protection than concerns about risk of concussion.   

The human face is highly vulnerable to cuts and fractures even from a padded glove, and the female face typically lacks the stronger bone of such post-pubertal male features as the brow ridge and stronger jaw. 

The sometimes permanently disfiguring effects of broken face bones, and damage to nasal and ear cartilage have greater social significance to women and very likely, the sort of facial harm that is routine in male boxing being done to women is not deemed a good look for the olympics. 

Most importantly, the brain of both sexes is highly vulnerable to the effects of a blow to the head because the easily damaged brain bounces around inside the skull. If a fighter falls heavily onto their head, the effects may be worse still. The main reason the floor of the boxing ring is sprung and the posts are heavily padded is to reduce the risk of brain or spinal trauma from impacting them heavily.

If a boxer is dehydrated – a common factor in pre-fight measures to make the very strictly controlled weight grades – the damaging effects on the brain may be amplified. 

Sometimes blows to the head result in obvious symptoms of mild concussion which, in boxing, could be a technical knock out; sometimes they result in a more severe concussion involving loss of consciousness – a literal knock out. 

What is now known about concussion is that if you have even a mild one, you should avoid any further blows to the head as they are likely to exacerbate the damage to the delicate structures of the brain.

More serious brain damage can be catastrophic and from a single blow, or accumulative from repeated blows. 

All contact sports involve the risk of forms and degrees of harm, but boxing is the only sport in which causing harm to your opponent's brain is not just permitted, if the damage is severe enough to result in a technical or a literal knock out, it's an automatic win. 

The aim of delivering blows to the torso and arms in boxing are not just for the points that can be scored by hitting the target areas of head and torso, they are also to hurt and tire the opponent to make them drop their guard so that bout-winning blows to the head can be delivered.

The importance of all this to the current situation in women's olympic boxing is, if boxers competing in the female category happen to have a genetic condition which has resulted in full or partial virilisation at puberty, they will have all or part of the very significant average performance advantage (APA) that male boxers have over female boxers. 

Part of that APA resides in a far greater punching power due, in large part, to the proportion of male body weight which is skeletal muscle and bone. 

People who have gone through a male puberty will typically have a significantly greater proportion of their body weight in bone and skeletal muscle than people who have gone through female puberty. This means their body type is more effective both in delivering punches, and in absorbing them. 

If that happened, it would not be fair, nor would it be safe.

There is no doubt in my mind that all these athletes are being used as pawns by forces engaged in a wider geo-political battle. 

The hapless boxers who have been drawn into this debacle now include a young Russian whose name has been dredged up from the round of 16 in the 2023 world champs as “proof” that the “Russian-led IBA” banned Khelif in order to restore the Russian woman's unbeaten record.   

This piece of mind-boggling post-hoc mendacity, which has appeared on Khelif’s Wikipedia page and widely via the western media, requires us to ignore all the preceding political shenanigans such as the US-led boycott of the IBA, the formation of World Boxing in opposition to the IBA, and the removal of IBA’s olympic accreditation etc. 

It also requires us to completely ignore the other women of colour who Khelif beat to get to gold medal contention, and focus instead on a very young, very blonde Russian thus helping to stoke both Russophobia, and the ethnically-charged elements of the drama which are exemplified by an emotive post on X which claimed in relation to Carini, that “white women’s tears have ruined another brown woman’s life”. 

I deplore the right's hysterical reaction which, by such despicable tactics as declaring Khelif to be a sexual predator, has descended en masse into the gutter where it is indulging in shameless Islamophobia.

On the other side, the west’s various useful idiots are focussing inordinate amounts of time and energy on supporting Khelif (Lin seems to be reduced to a supporting role), and on attacking “terfs”. 

As a result, most are paying little or no attention to the Israeli team whose presence at the olympics was expected to be the focus of much comment and protests, given the Israeli government’s shameful and on-going actions in Gaza and more widely in the Middle East. 

Go figure. 

Once Upon A Time ....

The good ship Gender Idealist set out to circumnavigate the globe carrying a large number of Gender Missionaries to spread the word of the Gender Identity Gospel. Before they set off, the first mate, Jude Butler, being nimble and full of bravado, climbed the rigging to nail the Gender Identity colours high on the main mast. 

When the banners streamed in the benign trade winds, the crew and the observers on the dock all cheered loudly. 

Initially the ship encountered preternaturally calm seas and steady, following winds. So smooth was their passage, so clement the weather, they were surprised when a smaller ship, the Gender Realist, appeared on the horizon and began to overhaul them.

Fearful the Gender Realist would steal their wind and their doctrinal pre-eminence, the captain of the Gender Idealist gave the order to “person the cannons” and sink her.

Despite their far superior fire power, by dint of very bad aim and the adverse effects of several loose cannons, they only managed to damage the Gender Realist which fell behind as its crew tended the wounded and tried to repair the ship.

Those aboard the Gender Idealist rejoiced but their celebrations were premature as a heavily armed enemy ship, the Sex Essentialist, appeared on the horizon, all sails set and intent upon sending the Gender Idealist to the bottom of the sea, with all hands.

The crew of the heavily listing Gender Realist were divided on whether to ask for assistance from an enemy ship. A mutiny broke out and half the crew took to the boats and joined the Sex Essentialist.

After firing on the Gender Realist with the aim of crippling or sinking her, the Sex Essentialist set off in pursuit of the Gender Idealist.

As often happens at sea, the clement conditions changed. The fair trade winds died leaving the Gender Idealist becalmed and a sitting duck for the much larger and better armed Sex Essentialist.

Demasted, its sails in tatters and its supplies exhausted, the Gender Idealist limped into a port where many of its complement promptly absconded having seen another ship, Palestinian Rights, was in need of crew.

The Sex Essentialist, sans competition, could have sailed on spreading its fundamentalist doctrine but upon seeing another ship, Radical Zionist, step up its bombardment of the Palestinian Rights they decided to join forces with it

Meanwhile, out at sea, the crew of the Gender Realist were busy carrying out repairs and arguing about how best to launch a surprise attack on the enemy.

The End.

On Violence and Human Nature

I don't believe that male aggression and capacity for violence is innate; women can be aggressive, cruel, violent and self-centred, and men can be gentle, compassionate, and altruistic. 

Because we are innately social beings who learn much of what it means and how to be human, learning is the dominant partner in the symbiosis between nature and nurture.

There may well be some people who, even in the most optimal of nurturing conditions, would be violent and aggressive, a lack of empathy making them incapable of feeling sympathy for the plight or the pain of others, and as a result, capable of extreme cruelty.
 
In a healthy society, such people would be seen as pathological and be treated accordingly. It is a measure of the possibly terminal sickness of our social world, that such people often become leaders who gather around them, echelons of enablers and colluders. 
 
Those lickspittles form a powerful buffer class which is generously rewarded in terms of status and money for such functions as portraying and feting their leaders’ cruelty and violence as strength and resolve; depicting profound self-centredness and venality as innate and desirable human qualities, the absence of which makes others weak, inferior, and in need of the superior ones’ steady hands on the helms of the state and the economy. 
 
Given most of these pathological humans are male, a necessary function of the enablers is embedding the notion that the qualities required of a leader are those associated with being male.
 
How better to justify pathological male human behaviour than to ascribe those qualities to an all-powerful creator who made man in His image. 
 
How better to cement that than to argue god granted His creation dominion over the entire world, including over the female human? Create a mass of doctrinal demonstrations of the creator’s capriciousness and cruelty which serve to grant license to those He grants the right to rule, to act in the same way. Briskly sidestep the contradiction inherent in a single, sexless god having created a world in which, for the most part, every species requires both a female and a male in order to reproduce itself, and argue that the creator demands absolute, unquestioning obedience, and His chosen leaders have the devolved right to demand the same of those they rule over.

 
The inescapable conclusion is, the all-powerful creator of the monotheist patriarchal tradition is nothing more or less than a projection of the pathological human qualities which have come to dominate the social world, and as a result, now threaten the natural world. 
 
We are a strange species. We are capable of being as viciously cruel and exploitative of our own kind as we are of all others, and yet many of us are also capable of acts of creativity simply for the joy of creating, and of being generous, compassionate, and altruistic without thought of earthly or heavenly reward.
 
In the modern world, many of us now have the capacity to see more widely than ever before in human evolution. That is a burden for too many and a blessing for too few. 
 
People who refuse even to acknowledge let alone engage with the annual holocaust of small children of colour, refer to their pets as “fur-babies”, lavishing the most extreme and anthropomorphised care on them. Many people collude in the mass extinction of other species while weeping over sentimental animal stories, or fly into homicidal rages towards anyone who bursts their virtual feel-good bubbles. 
 
Some of that is an understandable defence mechanism, a sort of self-soothing that helps people to deal with the unbearable horrors of the world our masters have created and want to perpetuate. 
 
I don’t blame them but when they are warned to look up at the powerful because what is coming will not spare them, their human children or their fur-children or any other living thing they value – if they still persist in looking down or sideways to find scapegoats, then I will attach blame.
 
 
 

A Plague On Both Houses

 A recent conference here in NZ brought the gender critical feminist (GCF) vs trans rights activists (TRA) stuff back to the forefront of my political consciousness. I’d been a tad distracted by such minor issues as Israel's war on Palestine, the implications of the clearest statement yet of a China-Russia axis in opposition to the US, possible global war and definite global warming, species extinctions, mass pollution, etc etc.

Yes, I know, how dare I expand my political focus to include such things?

Also in the NZ news today, a Palestinian family want to bring four orphaned Gazan children here.  Most of the replies under the story were ... well, suffice it say, the wanton, ugly selfishness of some people never fails to amaze. I think I’ve seen the worst and then the fuckers outdo themselves. 

On X-marks-the-plot a young person who has bought into the gender identity orthodoxy posted a rather silly comment and was piled on by anti-trans accounts with a ferocity and illiberality that matches anything TRAs and allies dished out to GCFs before the political tide started to turn.

And that was on top of the depressing sight of people who claim to be feminists or allies – but whose narrow focus means they never were or are no longer feminist in any politically or critically meaningful sense of the word – lining up to try to give a feminist they disagree with on that one issue, a virtual kicking.

It’s even more depressing because it’s about an alliance with, and in defence of a right wing fundamentalist Christian man who is opposed to pretty much everything feminists ought to stand for. Even on the single issue of gender identity, his start point and what he wants to achieve are radically different from a feminist start point or what any feminist should want to achieve. 

I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything more foolish, this week anyway, than a lesbian defending a patriarchal-family promoting, right wing Christian as being a solid ally to women because he’s nice to her, and they’re in agreement on this one issue – an issue which is so vital we have to put all manner of wider rights at risk by entering into such alliances.

If the religious and secular right wing do gain enough political traction to roll back all those formal rights ... most of which Neo-lib compliant governments doled out as a distraction from their dismantling of working class collectives and hard won rights .. well, she says blithely, we’ll deal with that if it happens.

I want to grab her by the scruff and say, who do you think will be left to deal with it? Exactly how are you going to build a coalition of feminists and allies to defend the rights that you just put in jeopardy because you decided this single issue was so all-important that you allied with the enemies of women’s and gay rights?

Increasingly I can’t stomach those on BOTH extremes of the gender identity divide who :

1. engage in or foment abusive and often ad hominem pile-ons against anyone who disagrees with them; (especially vile are those who do so from behind a veil of anonymity);

2. worry about the ill-effects of puberty blockers on the tiny minority of kids who go on them but who are silent on all other forms of paediatric iatrogenic harm, not to mention the impact on kids of exposure to environmental pollutants etc;

3. obsess about the dangers posed to kids from sexual predators (real and imagined) but have nothing to say about the multiplicity of fatal harms done to millions of small children annually as a direct result of economic exploitation;

4. focus on trans athletes in women’s sports but have never been involved in sport or expressed an opinion about the impact of rampant commercialism on sport generally, or the grossly disproportionate status, funding and remuneration in women’s sport;

5. fret about “trans women “ / “trans identifying males” having access to women-only public facilities but are silent on or even collude with the rise of a religious-secular right that could push women back into the domestic sphere;

6. shout about “trans women “ / “trans identifying males” being incarcerated in women’s prisons but have nothing to say about NZ’s appalling incarceration rate which is second in the OECD to the USA, and which disproportionately impacts Māori & working class people and most especially Māori women. Those who also align with, or who ineffectively oppose political parties with policies that will increase those rates, get bonus points for hypocrisy and opportunism.

If you listen to the “White Left” it’s all the fault of the evil TERFs, that coven of convenient witches who can be dragged to the virtual stake for a now ritual immolation.

If you listen to the “Coalition of the Anti-Woke” or the “Once Were Feminists” brigade, and it’s all the fault of TRAs and the Woke who need to be dragged to the virtual stake for the ritual immolation.

The truth lies somewhere in between these two increasingly noisome extremes and it is the duty of all people of common sense and good judgement to join me in saying, "A plague on both your poxy houses".

The Politics of Peeing

I took issue with a post on X that the reason there are women’s loos, prisons etc is because men pose such a physical threat to them, women demanded and got separate provision. My post was misconstrued, so I will try to explain myself. 

Leaving aside the reductionism and pessimism of the view of men as innately inclined to physical and sexual predation of women, the reality of the emergence of sex segregated public provision is more complex than female activists having forced it.

The following just scratches the surface of a multi-layered and complex issue.

The rise of public sanitation 

In Britain and the empire, before the Victorian era, public health measures such as public loos, were largely non-existent.

Prior to the installation of water closets in the home, the wealthy would use a close-stool, the contents of which would be emptied by a servant, usually female.

If there was no ready access to a close-stool, ladies would pee in a special pot carried by a maidservant. Gentlemen, if in male company only, peed in a container in a corner of the room or out a window.

If they weren’t near a chamber pot or privy, poor women and men pretty much peed and pooed wherever they could, and their privies would be shared by the occupants of several dwellings.

The Victorian era saw an increase in wider public sanitation measures in cities to stop the spread of diseases like cholera. Epidemics are not only bad for business, they can also kill the rich.

The provision of public loos was heavily influenced by both concerns about public health, and concerns over the “immorality” of people exposing themselves in public. The latter was far more focussed on women than men.

Closed crotch knickers

Prior to the development of closed crotch knickers in the late regency era, it was easier for all women to pee in public, and with the influence of the French Revolution, wealthy women’s dress, outside of formal court dress, was much less restricting. 

Working women were always forced by finances and the physical demands of their lives to dress more simply.

Men didn’t wear knickers either but pulled their long shirt tail between their legs. NB. Men’s shirts still had a tail long after underpants became a thing.

Interestingly, closed crotch knickers for women were initially regarded as immoral. The rise of bourgeois Victorian morality saw them become de rigeur, and the absence of knickers or wearing of open crotch knickers were seen as immoral.

The impact of closed crotch knickers on the politics of peeing and pooing was that they necessitated increasingly voluminous skirts and petticoats to be lifted and the knickers to be lowered. Prior to the invention of elastic, knickers were held up by tapes around the waist which had to be untied and retied.Women of all classes no longer had the ability to spread their legs or squat and have a discreet pee.

Female sequestration

The wives and daughters of wealthy/powerful men were sequestered in the home for the most part, and were the main focus of patriarchal modesty and chastity standards aimed at the guarantee of paternity and the transmission of title and/or property.

However, the domestic sphere for wealthy women was a world away from the lives of the masses.

What a lot of middle class, white feminists forget or choose to ignore, is that many working class women were not sequestered in the home in the same way.

There was a “trickle down” of upper class and bourgeois morality, but it was often over-ridden by the need to exploit the labour of working class women. (1)

The first people to be drafted into factories were pauper women and children. Women worked on the land, and in workshops, in mills and mines, and in the houses of those whose exploitation of the working class enabled them to employ an army of servants to empty their piss pots and middens, and wash the cloths used to wipe arses. 

Even middle class people employed a maid of all work.

There was a vast army of women who carried the dual burdens of their own domestic chores plus low paid/low status employment, and were held to bourgeois standards of decorum while being forced to live in ways that made maintaining them impossible. 

The late Victorian/Edwardian era saw the entry of large numbers of middle class women into the public sphere, and with that the need for both public loos, and the provision of them in commercial and educational buildings etc.

Many men resented the intrusion of women into male areas of employment and blocked or did not support such provision – the so-called "urinary leash." (2)

Due to prevailing modesty standards, it was unthinkable for a “respectable” woman to lift her skirts and drop her knickers in the vicinity of a man, or even to do so within hearing distance, so it was inevitable that all public loos were strictly sex segregated. The clothes women had to wear also made the process of using a loo both time consuming and difficult.

Most women were influenced to some degree by the modesty standards that were a cornerstone of patriarchal religion, and those standards were in play in movements agitating for an increase in provision of women’s loos.

Women did not need to demand sex segregation, it was a given.

The penal reform work of the remarkable Elizabeth Fry is a case in point. She was a member of a wealthy Quaker banking family and very devout. As such, although her penal reform mission became wider than sex segregation, her concerns included the “low and deplorable state of morals” of both female and male prisoners in the prisons of the regency era when the infamous Bloody Code was still in force. 

The movement she ignited, to segregate prisons by sex, was as motivated by questions of sexual morality as it was by a concern for the safety of the mainly poor women who were incarcerated in the brutal prisons of the day. 

It was the wider acceptance of those concerns which resulted in sex segregation being readily agreed and quickly implemented, while other, equally important, penal reforms were not. 

Projecting a 21^st century liberal or radical feminist analysis of sex segregated provision back two centuries onto the likes of Elizabeth Fry risks taking presentism into the realms of caricature.

The Social Compact

Sex segregation of public loos, changing rooms, etc was and remains a powerful social norm which can be backed up by the law if there is criminal action or intent.

So powerful was the normative acceptance of sex segregation, when sex discrimination laws were drafted in the 1970s, no one questioned the exceptions written into them to make provision of women-only spaces and services lawful. It continued to be seen widely as a natural and desirable.

 

 Notes:

(1) In the US, the role of slavery, Jim Crow, and the post-slavery hyper-exploitation of African American women, was a gaping hole in much of early white American feminism. In the UK and associated countries, there was a similar gap of the situation of working class women and women of colour.

(2) I worked in the Fire Service in London in the 1990s and saw first-hand how resentful many men still were about women's intrusion into what they saw a male preserve.

Jabotinsky’s Sword

Guest post By Joel Belasco

I grew up in a secular Jewish household after World War 2, with the Holocaust as a haunting frame of reference. There was a romantic attachment to Israel and we had a tin collecting box for the Jewish National Fund on the hall table. Israel could do no wrong because it was showing the world that Jews could be strong and would not tolerate the antisemitism that had been part of their history. 

What was not understood by those with a romantic view of Israel as the David facing Goliath, was that the realisation of Israel as a Jewish state was part of a longer term project to displace Arabs in the colonisation of Palestine.

The modern state of Israel was not the realisation of a biblical prophecy, and its belligerent, aggressive ethnonationalism is not a justifiable response to the genocidal barbarity that was suffered by Jews in the Holocaust. It actually pre-dated those horrors.

During the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement emerged among Ashkenazi as a response to antisemitism experienced by  Jews in Europe and Russia. The movement was religiously influenced, promoted the use of Hebrew as its language, and wanted a Jewish homeland in what it saw as its historic place of origin in Palestine. 

The Zionist project always was effectively colonial in nature, seeking to transplant people from a European or Russian environment into Palestine, which was already occupied by an Arab population who were Muslim, Christian and Druse. Displacing the Arab population of Palestine was always an objective of Zionists who espoused an aggressive ethnonationalism using biblical references as their justification. 

Theodor Herzl, a driving force in developing Zionism politically at the end of the nineteenth century, saw the establishment of a Jewish state as, “an outpost of civilization against Barbarism”. 

At this time Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. Jewish settlers from Europe and Russia had started to acquire land in Palestine during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Jewish National Fund was established in 1902 with the objective of supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine. 

Before the First World War ended, the British Government was lobbied by Zionists to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland. 

At the end of WW1, the Ottoman empire, which had been in alliance with Germany, was defeated. The British took control of Palestine and were subsequently give a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations.

Together with other political concerns, the British Foreign Secretary, Balfour published a declaration which stated:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

This objective was then incorporated into the mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations.

Zionism did not then, and does not represent all Jews. The Bund, for example, held a contrasting position to the religious ethnonationalism of Zionism. It was left wing, secular, based on trade unions, transnational in outlook, opposed to war, and it promoted Yiddish as the common language of Jews. It did not support the idea of a Jewish homeland, but advocated struggling for equality and justice in the regions in which they lived.

In many ways, consigning Jews to their own homeland could be seen as getting rid of a problem nearer home.

The political radicalism of The Bund was smothered by the political machinations of Zionists, and ideologically by the support given to Zionism by influential Jews like Montefiore and Rothschild. 

Initially, Jewish settlement in Palestine was accepted by the majority population but as numbers increased following the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British Mandate, Jewish settlers met more resistance. 

The Haganah (Hebrew for “defence”) was formed in 1920 ostensibly to defend Jewish settlements. It was outlawed by the British authorities and operated with restraint until World War 2. As the British refused to open Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration, the Haganah used terrorist tactics to bomb infrastructure, and even a ship carrying Jewish refugees. (1) 

Once the state of Israel was established in 1948, the Haganah was dissolved as an underground force and integrated into the Israel Defence Force (Tzva Haganah le-Yisra’el).

The Irgun, which broke with the Haganah in 1931, was a self-declared Zionist paramilitary organisation based on the Revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky:

“Zionism is a colonising adventure and it therefore stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonialization.” 

Jabotinsky’s “revisionism” rejected the notion that British Empire would support the creation of a Jewish state, and advocated establishing Jewish army to fight for Jewish sovereignty. Politically he was a nationalist and an economic liberal supporting a free market with minimal state intervention, and personal freedom, i.e., a right wing libertarian in today’s terms.

The Irgun was a terrorist organization and described as such by the British, the United States, and the United Nations. Among other acts, in 1946  they bombed the King David Hotel, which was HQ for the British Mandatory forces. The explosion killed 91 people and injured 46. The Irgun was also responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre, killing at least 107 Arab villagers in 1948. 

In a letter to the New York Times, Albert Einstein described the Irgun as a ”terrorist, right wing, chauvinist organization”. 

After the establishment of the state of Israel, the Irgun was incorporated into the Israeli Defence Force. Its political wing was the right wing, Herut (Freedom) Party. 

Menachem Begin, a former leader of the Irgun, founded the Likud party and became Prime Minister in 1977. The Likud has been in government since 1977 and is currently led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), under the leadership of Avraham Stern, broke away from the Irgun in 1940. They described themselves as terrorist with the aim of evicting the British from Palestine to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration and the establishment of a Jewish state. The Lehi were fanatics whose pursuit of their Zionist ideological goal seems to have blinded them to political realities. Unbelievably, Stern sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the belief that they would be more accommodating to Jews than the British. The modus operandi of the group focused on political assassination. Stern was shot by British detectives whilst being arrested in 1942.

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: {Ye shall blot them out to every last man}”– from the Lehi underground paper He Khazit.

Yitzhak Shamir, a leading member of the Lehi, who had argued for the legitimacy of the group’s terrorist actions, later became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983. 

The Israeli State initially integrated the Lehi members into the IDF but some of its members assassinated Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish nobleman (Count of Wisborg) and diplomat who was the United Nations Mediator in Palestine. Seeing him as a puppet of the British and the Arabs in advocating a peace plan, the Lehi shot him as he was driven through Jerusalem. 

The Israeli Government initially condemned the action and arrested Lehi members. However, before the first elections in Israel in January 1949, Lehi members were granted amnesty. In 1980, the Lehi Ribbon was introduced as a military award “for activity in the struggle for the establishment of Israel.”

There is a clear historical connection between the colonising aspirations of Zionists and their militaristic, religious ethnonationalism as given voice by the philosophy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. 
In 2005 a memorial day was created to honour Jabotinsky. 

In 2017, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the event, saying, “I have Jabotinsky’s works on my shelf, and I read them often.” (Quoted by Lazlo Bernat Veszpremy in Hungarian Conservative.)

Zionism is a continuous thread in the Netanyahu family. Benjamin’s grandfather, Nathan Mileikowsky, was a Polish Zionist Rabbi. The family emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1920 and their name was changed to Netanyahu (Hebrew for Nathan). Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, the historian, Benzion Netanyahu, was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary when he was living in New York. Upon the death of Jabotinsky he became executive director of the New Zionist Organisation of America. 

In 2009 he is quoted as saying in an interview in Maariv, a Hebrew language daily:

“The tendency to conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him to compromise. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.”

In the wake of WW2, with awareness of the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust, and with thousands of displaced people, the establishment of a Jewish State became a prominent international issue. But Britain still held a mandate of the territory of Palestine and had been negotiating with Arab leaders since WW1. However, the shadow of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising a homeland to Jews, loomed large. 

Proposals for power sharing were challenged strongly by Zionists who could see the realisation of the project they had been working towards for more than fifty years. 

Arabs living in Palestine, seeing the colonial aspirations of the Zionists, began armed resistance. 

The British surrendered the mandate in 1948, and the United Nations took control and made the decision to establish Israel as a Jewish state in Palestine. 

The Zionist government of Ben Gurion, which had recruited  groups of Zionist terrorists (the Haganah, the Irgun and the Lehi,) to the Israeli Defence Force, was immediately engaged in the Arab-Israeli war. 

For the Arabs, this became al-Nakba as they were expelled from villages, towns and areas in which they had lived for centuries. 

By the end of the conflict, 750,000 Arabs had been displaced and consigned to refugee camps, and by appropriating Arab land, Israel had expanded its territory from the 55% allocated by the UN to 78%. Around 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 6,000 Israelis. Hundreds of villages were sacked and there were in the region of 70 massacres of Palestinians. 

What was, initially, an expedient move was soon recognized as having a geopolitical strategic benefit in locating a state with European roots among the Arab countries of the Middle East, and the USA was quick to seize that opportunity. 

The Zionist project that had begun in nineteenth century Europe and Russia and given a militaristic, anti-Arab colonising philosophy by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, had become a reality. 

Its ethnonationalist, colonialist, aggressive xenophobia was usefully concealed by the sympathy extended to Jews after their experiences under the Nazis. The cultural and historical experience of the Nazi Holocaust has been used, cynically one might say, to recruit all Jews to the Zionist colonial project with romantic notions of Israel as the realisation of a religious prophecy. A powerful ideological exercise has been conducted by the Zionist Israeli State which has appropriated and weaponised the Holocaust, and used it to attack any criticism of it and its actions, as anti-semitic.

The Zionist project is deeply embedded in the Israeli State; two former Prime Ministers were active leading members of Zionist guerilla terror groups, and the current Prime Minister comes from a family of Zionists with strong links to Jabotinsky, and he recognises him as a guiding political influence. 

I have read that he has Jabotinsky’s sword in his office.

(1)   In 1940 the Patria was carrying about 1800 European Jewish refugees who, having been refused entry to Palestine, were bound for Mauritius. While it was anchored in the port of Haifa, the Haganah exploded a bomb on the ship which was intended to cripple it and prevent it leaving. The blast sank the ship and killed 256 people and injured 172 others. The survivors were rounded up by the British authorities, put on another ship and taken to Mauritius where they were kept in abominable conditions by the British until the end of the war at which point, they were given the choice of where they wanted to go.