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 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. 
 

Open Letter to Judge Kevin Glubb

Dear Judge Glubb,

Let me say at the outset that I am against sending people to prison unless there are compelling reasons for doing so. I would much rather New Zealand's judges did not use remand and custodial sentences for young offenders as often as you all do. 

I know that people, and especially young people, can behave in uncharacteristic ways when under the influence of alcohol or drugs and/or hormones, and/or due to peer pressure or mob mentality. 

Given a criminal record can have profound implications for a person's future, I accept that in some instances a discharge without conviction, and granting of permanent name suppression are warranted.

All of this is why, in principle, I approve of your ruling in the case of the young man who, at the age of twenty, punched a woman who is old enough to be his grandmother, in the face, causing her bodily and psychological harm.

According to the reports I've read, you described the offending in question as "moderately serious" given the blows were to the head. 

The outcome for the victim was a fairly minor physical injury; the psychological harm is much harder to assess but importantly, the assault had the very real potential to cause serious, possibly fatal injuries. 

That fact should have featured in your sentencing, if only to use the opportunity to send a message to all men who punch women, and to young men who punch anyone in the head but especially old women, that it is an extremely dangerous act.

You may not be aware of it but men on average punch 160% harder than women. A man punching a woman is seldom an even contest; a young man punching an old woman is about as uneven as it gets.

That aside, women's ability to withstand the force of a blow to the head is significantly less than men on average because of sex-based differences in the musculature of the male and the female posterior cervical spine.

Add to that, the probability of age-related osteoporosis in a 70 year-old woman, and any blow from a man, especially one in the grip of adrenaline and testosterone disinhibition, is likely to result in fractures. A blow to the head could result in a catastrophic cervical fracture.

The young man's defence was that he is "neurodiverse", ie he has ADHD and mild autism, which make him more prone to acting impulsively. 

However, despite his reduced impulse control, he had got to the the age of twenty without any prior arrests or convictions which suggests either he must have had a sequestered life, or controlled himself pretty well, or there was a trigger in that situation, ie the anger he felt on behalf of trans people who he thought were being attacked by the mainly older, female rally attendees.

Whatever one's opinion of the victim vis-à-vis her reasons for being at the rally, her actions in challenging a person who was removing lines placed to delineate the rally and the protesters, her refusal to engage in restorative justice, or the use of the case in the on-going arguments about trans and women's rights, nothing can reasonably be said to mitigate such an assault.

It's as reasonable to argue that the young man's action, far from being impulsive, was somewhat calculated in that it is highly unlikely he would have lost control of his fists if the person he was confronting had been a large, muscly man.

It is noteworthy that in 2014, you were faced with another twenty year-old man who was charged with a similar assault. 

In the grip of extreme alcohol and adrenaline/testosterone disinhibition, and after a domestic dispute, three police officers attempted to arrest him. In the course of the arrest he punched a detective in the face causing a small cut and a black eye.

The two defendants were the same sex and age; they both suffered a serious loss of impulse control, and there were analogous injuries caused to their victims.

So, what was so different that the young man in 2014 deserved to be sent to prison for thirteen months, with no reporting restrictions, while the young man in 2024 got discharged without conviction and was granted permanent name suppression?

Was it being drunk as opposed to being neurodiverse?

Was it resisting arrest by three police officers and in the process punching one of them in the eye, as opposed to launching an unprovoked attack on a 70 year-old woman?

Was it being working class and brown skinned as opposed to middle class and white skinned?

Or was it having prior convictions – which of course may well have been connected to being working class and brown skinned?

Drugs and commercialised medicine......

Hello Bloglet my old friend, I've come to talk to you again....

I have a real issue with the unnecessary prescription of drugs. Whether that is the use of synthetic oestrogen to delay a natural ageing process or alter a genetically determined ratio of female to male sex hormones, the administration of powerful drugs to slow bone thinning, the prophylactic use of antibiotics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, the over-prescription of opioids for chronic pain, the use of full-month contraceptives to stop menstruation – it's all too often an appalling waste of resources and it can do immense harm.

Every drug we take has to be metabolised – the biggest burden in that is carried by our liver and kidneys which are part of an integrated system so what adversely affects them, affects every other organ and system. 

Every drug will react in sometimes impossible to predict ways with the individual's metabolism at a particular point, and may interact with other chemicals, including those to which the individual is exposed in the wider environment.

We live in a world that is saturated with a vast array of chemicals – it is estimated that Americans are exposed to around 80,000 in their immediate environment. 

In isolation, any one of those chemical's effects on any given individual at any given point in their life are hard to predict; in combination, it is a convoluted nightmare. 

We should all be doing everything we can to rid ourselves and the planet of these pollutants – and medical professionals should be doing everything they can not to add to the burden we all carry. 

Instead, they are increasing not just the prescription of drugs – too often palliatively and prophylactically – but the use of unnecessary surgeries which always involve the administration of highly toxic drugs at a point when the body, due to the surgery, is at a low ebb.

Modern medicine has a side to it that is ugly and indefensible – the vast growth of commercialised appearance medicine with its cynical, profit-centred preparedness to cater to every whim, to feed off people's unhappiness and insecurity.

When the use of drugs and surgeries is essential to save life or to reduce or remove extreme suffering, there should be no moral dilemmas. Such situations should sit at the very top of the medical triaging process but all too often they don't. People suffer and die even when their situation objectively warrants them being the highest priority; and they suffer and die because they are poor, do not have insurance, and because so much of the available human, drug and technological resources are now diverted into the lucrative branches of what has become a medical-industrial complex.

The beating heart of that complex is not humanitarianism and medical ethics but the pursuit of profit and professional prestige.

Care to argue with that?