Distract, deflect, divide and demonise

This post was prompted by the current witch hunt being conducted by the right against a Green Party list MP in New Zealand. 

All this at a time when the right's use of covert domination has never been more apparent, but nor has its politics of overt domination.

The men in suits who run the world largely prefer the use of the ideological cosh and chains, but they know they have to periodically remind the actual and the immanently oppressed of the real cosh and chains, the production of which also has the benefit of yielding immense profits, largely out of the public purse. "Sanction the scroungers; protect the taxpayer" the ranting right wails as the state pours $billions of taxes into the pockets of the corporate military-industrial complex.

The reminders take various forms. There are the forever and the periodic wars; the raining of bombs on refugees living in tents; the snatching of families off the street to be imprisoned and deported; the blatant theft of lands and homes; the assassination of leaders and/or the destruction of any and all collectives which pose a threat ... 

How the hell have we ended up in a world teetering on the edge of several coalescing, mutually escalating social and natural disasters? 

What has any of this to do with a Green Party list MP in New Zealand who has become the target of a right-wing dirty politics campaign which, with typical disregard for logic let alone ethics, howls about “child safety” while using photos of a child in its unhinged attack on the child’s parent?

What part has the essentially individualistic and individualising politics of identity played in getting us here?

I’ve said all this before for many years but it bears repeating.

With the rise of Neo-liberalism, the political fulcrum point was shifted rightwards and what was once centrist was framed as left-wing. We will call this the white left which I’ve described elsewhere as the “politically and theoretically exsanguinated left”. 

The old red left, with its emphases on the class struggle, on internationalism and peace, on women's and national liberation and civil liberties was easily routed in the west during the initial Neo-liberal offensive. 

This was due in no small part to the effects of left sectarianism (always a gift to the right and often purposefully fomented by it), and the global power shift created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. 

While some people benefitted considerably from the neo-liberal surge, in the form of increased social mobility and in greater employment opportunities and levels of remuneration and status, the mass saw the small windows of opportunity that had opened up after WW2 slammed shut.

Key working-class and liberation collectives were demonised or dismantled, with many of their hard-won advances eradicated. 

As Marxist political and social theory was undermined, distorted or discredited, and academia shifted rightward and back towards an emphasis on preparation for the forms of labour demanded by the new corporate capitalism, those movements lost much of their theoretical foundation.

At the same time as the great combinatory movements and the socio-economic theories that informed them were under attack, new movements and theories emerged in the form of the politics of interest and latterly of identity.

These were apparently progressive and liberatory but in reality were a distraction from the bigger picture, a side show to the main event which rapidly moved out of rehearsal into a full-scale production.

The politics of individual or small group interests or identity, fills several important functions for the men in suits.

It gives the appearance of a political-social opposition which is essential to the maintenance of the myth of capitalist democracy. 

Some of those groups’ demands can be accepted or even promoted, providing a diversion in the form of the appearance of liberality.

The movements can be divided into ever smaller and specifically focussed groups which can be made to compete with, or even to turn on and fight each other which allows the power-holders to deflect attention away from their increasingly exploitative and oppressive actions.

And they can be demonised once it suits the suits to shift into overt forms of authoritarianism, and/or to slip the leash on the attack dogs of the far right, the threat of which was obscured both by the fulcrum shift and by the white left’s acceptance of (even obsession with) individualism and identity.

The red left's job is, as always, to strip off the layers of appearance, expose the essence of what is an ineluctably exploitative and oppressive system, and form powerful combinations in order to change it – foundationally.

Given the might and the viciousness of those who hold the real reins of economic, political and martial power, that was always the hardest thing; it is also the most important thing given the consequences for the entire planet of leaving a quintessentially unsustainable, and socially and ecologically destructive system intact.

 

 

 

 

On Propaganda

I just had a conversation on Facebook in which some people were trotting out Israeli propaganda in its most undiluted – almost self-parodying form – in which the harm done to Israelis is amplified and magnified, whilst the harm done to Palestinians and others is denied, or minimised, or justified as necessary and proportionate.

In fact, such is the breadth of the Israelis' denial of harm, where it is acknowledged at all it is excused as unavoidable collateral damage caused by the actions of the enemy “other”. 

By means of the argument that by having forced "the world's most moral army" to be killers of tens of thousands of non-combatants, the enemy has inflicted psychological harm on them, the slaughter is then added to the harm done to Israelis. 

In both the style of warfare it wages, and in the type of propagandising about it, Israel follows the US.

I was accused by one of the people in the conversation of claiming that "Muslim extremism" is “Israel’s fault”, which actually occurs because Islam is an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler religion". As proof of that she claims Islamic terrorists have committed 40,000 acts of terror across the globe in the last decade alone, and cites several especially horrible examples.

This is classic Israeli spin. Israel's critics describe it as an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler state" so the Israeli spin doctors turn that back on Islam which, like Christianity still is, was the religion of empires. 

Only an ideologue or an idiot would claim that Israel alone has caused terrorism committed by people who are Muslim or in the name of Islam, although the right in Israel has played a major role in its genesis and growth. 

The Israeli state itself was rooted in terror; it always was and still is an “expansionist supremacist colonising settler” state that has cynically weaponised the holocaust, and promoted anti-Arab racism and wider anti-Muslim feeling to ensure enough support for its expansionist, supremacist, colonising tactics. 

Leaving aside the antisemitism implicit in the idea that it is Jews wagging the US or wider West’s tail, the originator and main beneficiary of Islamic terrorism is the USA which has the biggest stake in its creation and perpetuation. 

It's very hard to justify a global, on-going "War on Terror", with all the pouring of $trillions into the military-industrial complex, without the public seeing an obvious and terrifying terrorist enemy.

Trump’s ritual self-anointment (dick-waving) as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the least developed countries in the world, allegedly in pursuit of Islamic State. 

People surely cannot ignore the global manoeuvres of US Inc which have contributed to the genesis of Islamic militancy.

Surely all these pro-Israelis admit how odd it was for an estimated 6000 Hamas fighters inside a geographically tiny and heavily surveilled region to have been able to plan and train for an attack on a vastly more powerful neighbour without that neighbour’s much-vaunted military and civilian intelligence apparatus knowing a thing about it.  

We’re expected to believe that an intelligence apparatus which later could plan what, if it was carried out by an Islamic country or group would be called a "terror attack", on a mass of individual Hezbollah operatives living in a sovereign state, did not know an attack involving upwards of 6000 fighters was being planned by Hamas in an open-air prison? 

Israel is governed by a far right coalition which is being held to ransom by a gang of fascists who’d happily carry out their own “final solution” against Palestinians, and some of them are lunatic enough to use the nuclear weapons they’re not supposed to have on the basis that, “if we can’t have it, no one will”.

Exposing the lies that are pumped out to obscure the truth, is not being antisemitic; in fact, it’s antisemitic to not call the liars and warmongers to account because, however powerful the Zionists think they are, it’s power by proxy. 

If it is expedient to do so, the real power holders will pull the military aid plug and do deals with compliant Arab regimes because this is all about US Inc and control of trade routes, oil, rare minerals and fresh water. 

You could cite endless examples – historical and contemporaneous – of acts of group and individual terror committed by people motivated by some form of religious bigotry / zealotry, and keep ignoring the wider context of the extent to which some states have been and are complicit in those acts of individual/group terror whilst using them as justification for committing vastly greater acts of state terror.

Israel’s primary ally and role model terror-bombed Japanese and German cities at the end of WW2, including using nuclear weapons against civilian targets, and it planned to use them against the USSR. 

It then bombed North Korea into oblivion in a proxy war against the USSR and China, killing upwards of 20% of the total population.

To protect western oil interests, the US toppled a secular government in Iran, installed a brutal tyrant whose repression of the left and intelligentsia opened the door to the current Islamic theocracy which the US now wants to wage on.

It blanket bombed Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, poisoning the land and water with carcinogenic  and DNA damaging chemical defoliants. It used the same tired old excuse that they were not to blame for the mass civilian casualties because the “enemy” hid among them. 

It fomented Islamic extremism in Indonesia to topple the leader of the emergent Non-Aligned Movement, and to destroy the world’s largest per capita communist party, anywhere up to a million of whom were killed.

It armed anti-government rebels in Afghanistan and convinced a load of western liberals that the muhjaheddin were "freedom fighters" against the “Soviet-backed” socialist government. 

Now it lies about who armed the mujahheddin and thus provoked Soviet intervention, and blames it on the new target of its war-mongering, Islamic terror group, Al Qaeda.

It told blatant lies (remember the Kuwaiti babies hauled out of incubators?) to swing public opinion behind its appalling acts of state terror in Iraq. 

After using the twin towers attacks (carried out by nationals of its ally, Saudi Arabia) as the justification to intensify the “War on Terror”,  it invaded and heavily bombed Afghanistan before stealing Afghani state assets and abandoning the place to the Taliban, of which it now stands in pious judgement.

In alliance with NATO it destroyed Africa's richest nation, Libya. Trump’s self-anointment as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the poorest countries in the world, under the guise of attacking Islamic State.

And then there are US Inc's maladventures across Central and South America, Europe , the Caribbean …. and on and on and on…. 

The defining characteristic of US Inc, of which Israel is a key part, is that in pursuit of the right to carry on exploiting, they lie, and they lie, and they lie ....

With “friends” like that, Israelis should not be surprised when they make enemies of pretty much everyone else and most people do not believe a word they say.

Fragile Masculinity Syndrome

I recently had an altercation on a local community Facebook page with a person who, contrary to FB rules, uses a pseudonym. He posted something which sought to lay the blame for the smelly and sometimes toxic algal blooms that are now a feature of the region’s rivers in summer, on “council contractors” digging holes. The aim of these “council engineered ponds”, according to him, is so the smell and toxins can then be blamed on farmers to justify further environmental regulation.

I posted a mildly worded reply pointing out that responsibility for issuing licenses to commercial companies to extract gravel lies with the regional authority, Environment Canterbury. I also said that reduced river flows, and the increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers combined with heavy irrigation are factors in the now yearly algal blooms.

Articulate women, especially older women, are anathema to men who suffer from fragile masculinity syndrome (FMS). Another man can call them a dick, thick as shit, a clown, etc but let a woman sound smarter than them, and their emotional fuses start to blow. 

I was soon to find out that this particular FMS sufferer is a misogynist of the first water; a wanna-be patriarch who believes that men should rule, and women should submit; that a woman’s place is serving her husband and looking after kids, and as for old women, they should do the world of men a favour, acknowledge their uselessness, and die.

He began the process of consigning me to the ranks of what eventually became a cabal of screeching-feminist-hippy-climate-change-doomsday-cultist-leftie-vaccine-promoting-authoritarians who, in his view are intent upon destroying the NZ economy. 

That combination of extreme ignorance and arrogance is like a red rag to an earnest pedagog like me, so I tried to explain more about why ECAN licenses gravel extraction, and the part played in the blooms by increased use of artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation.

My explanations about reducing riverbed elevation to maintain capacity between the stopbanks and thereby reduce flood risk, were clearly not comprehensible to someone so deeply mired in confirmation bias. He was clearly ignorant, even of what stopbanks are, why they were created in the first place and are carefully maintained. 

A tongue in cheek reply advising him to calm his amygdala and engage his frontal lobes was a step too far for his FMS, and he fixed me firmly in his misogynistic sights. 

(Spelling and grammar original; my emphasis in bold.)

HOW is THIS thing going to stop any flooding if there is a few banks ACROSS the river bed???if you think what you wrote made you sound smart, it didn't. The world doesn't revolve around you and that might be very hard thing to comprehend for old woman that's well past her expiry date. it doesn't mater if I say 1 + 1 =2 or if I say you are dumb if you don't know 1+1 = 2. It's still correct statement and it's nothing hyperbolic about it. This hippie attitude that it's bad to point out stupidity rather than the stupidity itself is going out of fashion and more and more people are starting to catch up. NZ is too ruined, economy is destroyed and the whole country was run to the ground while hippes were cheering about progression of feminism and environmentalism instead of making sure things are run responsibly, by competent men and in a way that would make tomorrow better than yesterday. So far the only result of this current madness is the fact that median income of $65 000 in 2025 is the equivalent of $8 000 in 2000 and everything is worse than 25 years ago...”

Unwilling to engage on his post any longer but wanting to clarify issues for others, I posted something myself. 

As someone who grew up in Canterbury, I know the streams on our region's shingle riverbeds have always grown algae as the flow decreases and the temperature of the water increases. I know also that there has been an increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers on the plains' thin alluvial soils, along with an increase in heavy irrigation which accelerates the leaching of nutrients into waterways.

As a result of that, when the rivers experience low flow, and/or water gets trapped in either naturally or artificially formed depressions, there is now a greater likelihood that the algae will proliferate and form "blooms".

Each alga is short-lived and as they die off, the resulting high concentration of dead organic matter in the water has the effect of reducing dissolved oxygen. The reduction in oxygen kills freshwater organisms which adds to the organic "soup" and to the unpleasant smell. Some algae also secrete toxins which, in high concentration, can harm mammals.

District Councils do not employ contractors to "engineer ponds" that form algal blooms in order to either deliberately or opportunistically blame it on farmers to justify an increase in environmental regulation of waterways. The responsibility for granting licenses to remove shingle from the region's riverbeds (to help slow bed elevation) lies with the regional authority, ECAN. 

It may be the case that the way shingle is being extracted needs to be more closely monitored.

It is certainly the case that the social and environmental costs of the impact on our region's waterways of an increased reliance on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation to force grass and legume growth on thin alluvial soils, need to be addressed.

There are science-based facts and there are opinions. As noted by a pseudonymous poster on this page, it's a science-based fact that I'm part of the older demographic. His depiction of my age making me, "an old woman who is well past her expiry date", is opinion. We are all entitled to our opinions but when they are ill-informed, ideological, or stray into expressions of bigotry, best be prepared to be challenged.

Mr FMS soon made his noxious presence felt on my post. (Spelling etc as per original)

You sound like someone involved in the scam or devout fanatic of the doomsday cult of climate change. any conflicts of interst you wanna disclose?

Stagnant water is ideal for growing algae and that's a fact. 

Making ponds like that will supercharge algae blooms - fact.  

making banks across river bed doesn't help prevent floods - fact. 

NZ doesn't use liquid manure PITS so leaching nitrogen (aka liquid manure) leaching into rivers is no concern.

Fish, ducks gulls and so shits into the water and that's the main source of nitrogen in the water, not a cow peeing into grass 1km away.

Farmers were blamed for the stink because very few people know about cyanobacteria and how it stinks when the bloom dies off and decays - fact

Kids and families were exposed to the toxins - fact 

FIY: you know how to gaslight and BS and yes you are well past your expiry date but you still think people will treat you like if you were 20 when you had some value. you should be busy taking care of your husband, kids and grandkids insted of trying to mess things up.

On another post, he made the extraordinary statement that “99.999% of science is wrong” which made me chuckle given he’d taken exception to me calling him out for hyperbole. Presumably in his world all the means by which he forms and communicates his views and earns a living are created by magic.

I wanted to address his points, but others weighed in and challenged him which made his final fuse blow and served to increase his obsessive focus on me. He went into a full-throated rant against pretty much everyone who is not a middle-aged, white man with misogynistic, ageist, anti-authority, conspiracist political views. 

Had I been able to address his post, I would have pointed out that I specifically referred to nitrate and phosphate fertilisers in conjunction with heavy irrigation on the Canterbury plains’ largely thin alluvial soils which lie over deep layers of porous gravels containing vast amounts of water, interspersed with impermeable finer sediments. 

When functioning properly the rivers feed water into the aquifers which drain towards the sea. With heavy irrigation on land adjacent to the rivers, the surface flow of nutrient-laden water may be towards them. The amount of liquid cow dung and urine on intensive dairy pasture is undoubtedly an added factor.

A lot of our region’s once pristine bore water is now contaminated with nitrates, and other water sources are contaminated with coliforms and require chlorination.

Our rivers have always had trees dropping leaf into them, and arguably way more fish and birds pooed into them in the past given the populations of both have dropped in recent years. They have also always had naturally formed depressions which trapped water as flow decreased and in which grew mats of algae. Those natural depressions are now added to by gravel extraction, and it may well be that ECAN needs to monitor that extraction more carefully.

Gravel extraction aside, there is no question that the scale of algal blooms, and especially toxic blooms, is connected to changes in land use, away from predominantly dry land sheep and arable farming into intensive dairying that is dependent on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation. 

Eventually I closed the comments and blocked him, and the page admins then removed his post and most of the comments under my post which is a shame as I wanted to screenshot them as evidence in the event that his abuse took a physical form.

This man, who seems to think it’s 1825 not 2025, and doesn't care that his ageism and misogyny will offend a lot of people, has clearly not factored in how easily identifiable he is given the internet and NZ's famous two degrees of separation which, in North Canterbury, is more like 1.25 degrees. 

Anyway, all this brouhaha diverted attention away from the pertinent issues – as it was intended to do. The strategy used by these people is, if you cannot address an argument, you troll the person making it. It's a despicable tactic when the issues are so critically important. 

 

The Slippery Slope Into Barbarism

A Facebook "friend" keeps posting stuff about transgenderism and how right people like her were/are to have been supportive of the likes of Trump because he is rolling back those "trans rights" which impact on women's rights.

I look at this way; prior to and concomitant with the rise of neoliberal (global corporate) capitalism, there was a radical shift of political theory and praxis to the right which meant that the popular perception of a “centre ground” – the fulcrum point if you will – shifted significantly to the right. 

Accompanying, and in fact aiding that was the rise, first of interest group, and then identity politics.

Instead of great national and international movements aimed at achieving and sustaining systemic change, there was a proliferation of smaller “issue”, latterly “identity” based movements. 

The old "red left" which aimed for foundational socio-economic change – not just accommodations within capitalism –  lost ground, especially with the demise of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.

Social democrats and socially liberal people shifted rightwards with the fulcrum point, adjusting their ideas and expectations of what being "left-wing” meant. 

For many of them it was simply not being “right-wing”. In the weird world of US politics, it was the patent absurdity of the Democratic Party being "left”.

For socially and politically liberal centrists – having abandoned all hope of socialism (if they ever had any) and with that class-based theory and praxis –  the focus on interest group, and then identity politics, was palliative. 

Attachment to movements that merely sought accommodations from Neo-liberal compliant states – but which in no way threatened the economic status quo – soothed their liberal hearts and minds as they benefited materially from neoliberal capitalism’s intensification of economic exploitation which was accompanied by an increased oppression of workers – somewhere.

For me, the big issue with transgenderism as political theory and praxis is that it is both individualistic and individualising. As such it dovetails perfectly with the right’s aim of breaking all great political-social combinations which challenge capitalism – not just into competing interest groups, but right down to the level of the “aspirational individual”. 

In the transgenderist orthodoxy that takes the form of a focus on the right to a bespoke sex/gender social and legal “identity” with an accompanying bespoke physical appearance.

Anyone who supports/promotes “Trumpism” because of the political right’s and ultra-conservatives’ opportunistic coat-tailing of feminist opposition to the transgenderist orthodoxy, is either a rightwing ideologue or some variety of useful idiot.

What annoys me about both extremes of this debate is the level of social and political myopia and a self-centredness that risks tipping into full-blown narcissism. It’s maybe why both extremes are drawn to Trump .. like attracts like. 

The social and natural worlds are in states of intense and worsening disequilibrium. Fact.

Marx warned that there was no inevitable progression of the social world beyond capitalism and into socialism / communism; if the hands of the hyper-exploiters and oppressors are not wrested off the controls, we could see the social world tip into barbarism. 

Women who are cheerleading for the likes of Trump need to look outside the imperial bubble and the smaller bubbles of relative privilege which bounce around inside it, and place all their hyperbole about the threat to women of transgenderism, against what is objectively threatening women in the rest of the world – and who and what is behind those threats. 

More to point; they need to stop exaggerating and catastrophising as much and as risibly as the most ardent of transactivists ever did, and ask who and what can stop the slide into barbarism? 

On Bigotry

Another post that started out as a thread on “X marks the plot” but grew too long.

Those who know me are aware that I've been an active anti-racist all my life, which includes opposing all forms of antisemitism. How can I not? My left-wing politics and knowledge of history aside, I have Jewish family, and I count many Jewish people among my dearest friends and comrades.

 

I know that among people who profess support for Palestinians are some who are antisemitic, just as among those who profess support for Israel are antisemites who currently hate and fear Arabs and Muslim people more. 

 

I don't accept the highly ideological or idiotic premise that criticism of the policies and actions of a far-right Israeli government is actual or de facto antisemitism. 

 

Those who stick the labels of "racist" or "antisemite" on any argument or behaviour of which they disapprove, risk emptying the concepts of political and critical meaning, and as such they serve to weaken opposition to racism and antisemitism.

 

Israel is the de facto 51st state of the US. It couldn't exist without US federal backing; its interests align with those of the USA, albeit that the current ultra-right-wing Israeli government has slipped the leash and savaged more non-combatants than its imperial master might have wanted it to. 

 

It’s one thing justifying owning an attack dog by claiming it’s for defensive reasons because of the dangerous neighbourhood; it’s another thing entirely when the dogs get off the leash and rip a load of kids to pieces.

 

The old European imperial powers advanced their interests via settler colonialism. They declared a land to be “empty” of people or populated by people who lacked the ability to utilise its natural resources, and/or to govern themselves in what the imperialists deemed to be a "civilised" way.

 

Zionists couldn’t claim terra nullius in Palestine given the known history of the role of multiple empires in the region since people first settled it … Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Hebrew, Carthaginian, Minoan, Greek, Persian, Illyrian, Thracian, Etruscan, Iberian, Roman, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Arab, Berber, Ottoman, British … so they relied on what is a variation of the lies told by the white South African apartheid regime. 

 

They claim that when Jews began to arrive in Palestine in large numbers from Eastern Europe in the late C19th, only around 250,000 Arabs lived there, most of whom had arrived in recent decades, and all, according to the Zionists (many of whom were mired in European supremacism), were an inferior people.

 

Also, they claim, that although Muslim invasions of the region in the 7th century AD had resulted in Arabic being the main language and Islam the main religion, it was never exclusively an Arab region.

 

No one has ever claimed it was but more than twelve hundred years of settlement and cultural-religious influences cannot be denied or deemed inferior without creating a justified backlash.

 

Many Arab nationalists saw the Levant as a logical part of a Greater Syria with a capital in the ancient city of Damascus. Greater Syria was a potential Arab powerhouse that was anathema to the old and new imperial powers which wanted the Middle East to be a collection of small states they could dominate and play off against each other to protect the trade routes and the oil.

The Balfour Declaration which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the League of Nation’s Mandate that followed it, placated powerful Zionists in the UK and the US. 

It has been interpreted by Zionists as having granted a de facto legal right to sovereignty that was formalised by the 1947 UN partition resolution which established the state of Israel.

After the horrors of the Nazi slaughter of Jews became widely known, the UN resolution served as a political balm to assuage the guilt of the countries that had allowed the horror to happen and had refused entry to refugees.

The ultra-Zionists’ rewriting of a complex history rests firmly on the idea of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine as both a lesser people and as aliens, recent “invaders” of a land to which the Jewish people have both a divine right and an indigenous claim because their God promised it to Abraham, and there has been uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua. (Including the hyperbolic claim of being the “world’s first constitutional monarchy” around 1000 BC.)

It also sowed the seeds of the anti-Arab racism that is now a malignant cancer in the Israeli social body.

 

To ensure enough Israelis continue to elect right-wing governments and support their extremist measures, the population is heavily indoctrinated, with the IDF and compulsory military service playing a significant role in that. 

The most potent element of that indoctrination, apart from the fuelling of anti-Arab racism, is stoking fear and rage over the Nazi holocaust. That those right-wing governments directly and indirectly force young Israelis to participate in genocidal acts against mostly young Palestinians, is beyond tragic.

 

 

 

Nothing Wholly Disappears Off The Internet ....

I've been re-reading some of my old blog posts, and 11 years ago I wrote a post about unhinged reactions to a video of some girls having a fight. 

The comments were on a Facebook page (prior to the "feminisation" of the site which led to controls which the newly masculinised-Meta (snort) is now removing to curry favour with Trump Inc.) 

Now, we all know that certain things trigger the Amygdala Brigade into what, in hindsight, even they might see as behaviour deserving of a spell in a mental health facility or a prison.

I quoted the worst of them verbatim and provided links. 

Curious to see how the angry ones have moved on in the intervening eleven years, I checked on them.

About half of the accounts have been deleted but others are still there. There were some that were unintentionally funny, like the one who hurled abuse at the offending girls and then claimed New Zealand is a nation of kind, friendly and welcoming people.

One especially charming fellow wrote: 

"Fuck the fat one is an ugly cunt. Pathetic bitches. Those are some girls ill gladly smash 4 on 1. Dont care that im a male. Scum like that deserve a face kicking" ...

He now seems to have a daughter. I wonder if fatherhood has changed his mind about calling a girl, a fat ugly cunt, and wanting to kick her in the face?  

His was by no means the worst. I think this one, whose FB page is no longer available, takes pride of place for the most unhinged and sadistically misogynistic:

"Fucking fat whores need to get probed in the ass with a knife shot in the knees tounge choped off ears cut off fingers and toes and the shove them in a dumpster"

Given the use of "ass" and "dumpster" I don't know if this person was a New Zealander, but there was a very seriously deviant young man in Christchurch who, in 2016 and 2019, was sentenced to a combined twelve-year sentence for possession and distribution of objectionable material, and for child rape and other serious child sex offending. In May last year, he was released on highly restrictive parole conditions, which includes no unsupervised access to the internet and a curfew.  

What are the odds?

That aside, these sorts of splenetic explosions of vileness are once again granted immunity, courtesy of Meta's spineless capitulation to the New Patriarchs.

The Turn Of The Screw

I predicted a Trump win, and I’ve also predicted he won’t see out his term which would mean the world will suffer a Vance presidency.  

In analysing the Democrats' defeat, it must be acknowledged that Harris had to overcome the double whammy of her sex and her ethnicity in a country which, in its bones, is sexist and racist. In addition, her parents were "immigrants" of the sort that Trumpists have been encouraged to see as the main cause of their mounting social and economic woes. 

There surely is no greater demonstration of the USA's national cognitive dissonance than the spectacle of the descendants of settler colonists and subsequent immigrants railing against other, more recent, immigrants.

Harris had to keep the warmongers (I refuse to grace them with the term hawk) in her party happy, and toe the party-corporate line in continuing to fund Israel’s brutal assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, while trying to persuade Muslim-Americans and anti-Zionist Democrats that they should still vote for her. 

She had to try to win back enough of the millions of angry, disillusioned, fearful working class Americans by promising to keep the trickle-down tap open a notch, while also keeping the predatory corporate class and their legions of affluent enablers and minions happy by not letting too much of what they see as “their money” flow down to the increasingly debased base.

She had to walk the political tightrope between professing an on-going, uncritical support for trans rights, (a cause the Democrats handled in a way that allowed the religious and secular right to make a bumper crop of political hay), and defence of women’s reproductive rights in the form of access to abortion and birth control – which the right want to erode.

She relied on a procession of celebrities using their tinselly star power to win votes from the various cults of celebrity that infest the USA and, due to its cultural hegemony, infest the rest of the world also.

She even appealed for support from some of the worst of USA Inc’s warmongering border-line and actual fascists.

All she had to do was to beat a bumbling, mumbling, incoherent, seventy-eight year-old, self-absorbed rich-boy with improbable hair and orange-hued skin. 

A sexist who holds women in contempt. A convicted felon. A cheat. A liar.  An out and proud ignoramus. A person whose popular appeal can only be explained in the context of the venality, cynicism, and opportunism of his main political opponents.

Some people, men and women alike, are drawn to the maverick, the bad boy – the man who appears to thumb his nose at convention and the forms of authority which maintain it. As is usual in the US, appearance has a tenuous link to essence. 

The real US is hidden under a glossy veneer of democracy and decency which obscures its plutocratic and essentially corrupt social and political foundation. USA Inc's foundation is now so riven with contradictions and so rotten, the veneer, even where it was once thickest and glossiest, has warped and cracked. 

Trump is not a maverick; he’s a narcissist who is driven not by ideology but by ego, by a drive for personal power that fills the places in his psyche where intellect, rationality, self-control and decency should reside. 

Trump’s ego is vast but hollow, and it requires a constant stream of fawning and flattery to keep it inflated. Those who want to influence or wholly control him know this.

Those of his supporters who aren’t drawn to his apparent individualism and political unorthodoxy have been captured by the cult of celebrity which wields immense influence in the US, and Trump was a media celebrity before he decided to enter politics. It is a measure of the USA's cultural depth that even the spurious claim to celebrity via a schlocky “reality-TV” show is enough to draw people to him.

Some people voted for him because they are desperate for anything seemingly solid and unsinkable that they can use as a buoyancy aid to stay afloat in increasingly wild socio-economic seas. 

Some perform a seemingly impossible leap of logic and common sense and turn him into an almost messianic figure. 

People will continue to analyse the reasons why he has won a second term as president despite all the aspects of his life, his intellect, and his morality that should be impediments to it.

The fact is, the Republicans won largely because their opponents failed to provide a viable choice for the tens of millions of Americans who desperately want their country to change – to change in its essence, not just see another coat of gloss paint or cheap veneer laid over the rotting base.

The women who voted Republican because Trump "knows what a woman is", because he promised to roll back trans rights, protect women's sport, keep gender ideology out of schools .... were conned. 

They were led to or actively chose to believe that the ideology of gender identity was the construction of the left; that somehow this "left" which is incapable of achieving much else, managed to impose an ideological framework on global corporations, on NGOs, and on corporate-compliant governments at all levels of governance and management. 

Their narrow focus prevented them from seeing gender identity ideology and praxis as a Neo-liberal project, the culmination of the rightwing politics of the "self", which was a nail in the coffin of mass collectivism, a wedge to topple the last of the trees in the leftwing forest.

The idea of the gender identity orthodoxy being a leftwing movement only makes sense in relation to the infantile notion of the Democratic party being left wing, which, by any sensible measure, it is not. 

It is essentially a right wing, corporate-friendly party that has recently embraced certain "liberal" issues. There is not even the pretence of making systemic changes, just some accommodations to take off the worst of the sharp edges and dull the most glaring contradictions. 

In essence, the Democrats' commitment to traditional leftwing values and causes takes the form of applying more layers of plastic veneer, gloss paint, and glitter.

Left wing feminists said all along that the way the ideology of gender identity was embraced and enacted risked being weaponised by the religious and secular right  – to the detriment of women's rights and wider democratic and social rights. 

As we are pushed into taking a stand on critically important issues, I will enter into strategic alliances with those liberals who embraced gender identity orthodoxy. Those who did so fanatically however, I am unlikely ever to trust, or forgive because they either lacked political acumen or they acted in bad faith.