A Frenzy Of Self Righteousness

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

Political White Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reds V the Whites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Crises

We have a cost of living crisis in New Zealand.

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

We have a deepening political divide.

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

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

We have a growing health crisis in New Zealand. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Just A Joke

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

Humour in a profoundly stratified world is seldom politically neutral. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also ask - why now? 

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

Why is Netflix suddenly enabling it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roe v Wade

I don't know enough about the arcane US politico-legal system to speak with real authority but it seems to me that if the right of women to bodily autonomy gets kicked back to state legislatures to determine, those states in which ultra-conservatives hold political and economic sway will carry on enacting laws that are harmful to women, and repealing ones that protect women, such as the criminalisation of spousal rape. (1)

And they will not stop there; they will also roll back minority rights which are protected by Supreme Court judgements.

Roe v Wade was a wedge which forced open a door the US ultra-cons want to remain closed or even to have bricked up.

It's a door that had led to changes in laws and social norms that undermine ideas and institutions which ultra-cons see as the very bastions of the American way of life. 

Following hard on the heels of the shock to the ultra-con psyche, of the anti-racist and civil rights' movement, women's and gay and lesbian rights had them reeling – abortion, decriminalisation of homosexuality, criminalisation of spousal rape, equal employment opportunity, same sex marriage, trans rights and latterly, the morphing of that into the Hydra of queer rights.

There's a powerful tension between social and political conservatism and what may be termed, social and political transgressivism. 

In a healthy society a balance is maintained between the extremes of social conservatism and social transgressivism – imagine it as a spring that is calibrated to hold the extremes in tension. 

If one extreme starts to pull too far or too fast, social forces which would usually remain gathered around the centre may move towards the other extreme to counter it. If enough of them move, the rebound effect can be extreme and sudden.

It is gender identity, with its core of hyper-individualism and its politically vague and theoretically tenuous conflation of sex and gender that led irrevocably to gender self-identification, which has proved to be the step too far for many. (2)

This step too far is not just for ultra-cons but for a rising number of women from across the political spectrum who have moved towards the ultra-con side, many of them on this single issue. 

Also moving are a load of opportunists and coat-tailers who see a political advantage in forcing a political and legal rebound.

That the first federal level move the US ultra-cons are making is an attack on women’s reproductive autonomy is an irony which seems to escape far too many.

Women, and especially left-leaning women and lesbians who have liked arms with the right on the gender identity question need to know that a political and legal rebound will adversely impact on them. 

Notes:

1) Spousal rape only became a crime in all states in the late 1990s and is still treated differentially in some states.

2) Ironically, post-modernism which has served the Neo-liberal project well with its undermining of Marxism, its emphasis on the individual, its essential idealism ... seems to have carried the seeds of its own destruction.