Jeremy Bentham was a British 19th century philosopher. He was the inventor of Utilitarianism, a moral philosophy that states that something is good if it creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This, however, fails as it neglects the fact that some things are inherently good or evil even though they may be popular. One of the examples of this would be a case where a mob demands the execution of a wrongly accused man. It is still wrong to execute an innocent person, even if this is massively popular and demanded by the majority of people. Bentham was also interested in prison reform and design. In his view, prisons should be laid out so that the prisoners and their activities were all under surveillance from a central hub, the panopticon. This constant surveillance would, he believed, lead to prisoners acquiring the habit of behaving decently and legally and so reform their characters ready for release back into society. Modern critics consider it a chilling, totalitarian surveillance society in miniature. Another of his ideas is truly bonkers. He believed that people – presumably members of the aristocracy and people accustomed to public service and social prominence – should preserve their ancestors after death through mummification and embalming, and put them on display as ‘autoicons’. The intention behind this bizarre idea is that people, surrounded by their dead relatives and antecedents, would then feel themselves encouraged to emulate their virtues. Bentham had himself preserved, and is on display in a glass case at Oxford University, except for his head, which is a waxwork. His real head is in a case somewhere, and not displayed.
However, the Utilitarians were behind the early 19th century hygiene reforms that cleaned up Britain’s cities by demanding proper sewage and the removal of waste from the streets to improve the inhabitants’ lives and health. And he was also a very much a political radical. He outlined his democratic views in Democracy – A Fragment. He believed that people weren’t naturally virtuous and public spirited, and that they acted primarily in their own interest. This meant that those governing also acted in their own interest, which was to expand their power against everyone else. They could only be kept in line through democracy and all adults possessing the vote. And he meant all adults. The franchise should be extended to include not just all adult men, but also women. He also wanted the abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England. This was in the 1820s, and it was nearly a century before British women acquired the right to vote. As for the abolition of the monarchy, the Lords and the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, Tony Benn was reviled as a Communist for advocating them, plus nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. They’re not policies I support, though the House of Lords needs radical reform as at the moment it has more members than the ruling general assembly of the Chinese Communist Party. But I am impressed with his staunch advocacy of democracy, especially at a time when many would have regarded it almost as seditious because of the excesses of the French Revolution.
And unfortunately he does have a point about the corruption of the governing class. We’ve seen it in the way the Tory administrations of the past eleven years have passed endless laws to benefit their class at the expense of Britain’s working people, and themselves personally. As when one of their number decided to relax the planning laws while angling for a lucrative property deal in London.
There have been voices on the internet claiming that democracy is in crisis and that people are giving up on it. If that’s the case, then it’s because we don’t have enough democracy in Britain. Last year we saw three prime ministers come and go, but were not allowed to elect any of them. It’s high time this changed.
Thanks to Gillyflower for pointing me towards this excellent article in Yorkshirebylines on Andrew Tate, the British/American far right activist Andrew Tate. Tate has just been arrested by the Romanian plod on charges of enslavement and human trafficking. His extreme right-wing supporters have been crying that somehow he’s been framed because it came after a Twitter spat with Greta Thunberg. Why the Romanian police would be so worried about that is, of course, never explained. It’s just left to the imaginations of their supporters, who assume that because Thunberg is a global Green activist and celebrity, the Romanian government is somehow desperately keen to defend her by imprisoning her critics and opponents. In fact, it appears that Tate was arrested on charges of imprisoning women and forcing them to perform pornographic acts. If this is correct, then Tate deserves to do a lot of time.
Tate’s father was Black Californian chess champion, who was honoured by the state for his achievements in the game at his death. After his father died, Tate and his brother’s mother moved to Luton, where they lived in poverty. He took up kickboxing, got on Big Brother and then was thrown off it after a video was found of him whipping a woman. He then set himself up as a self-help guru and anti-feminist, men’s right’s activist. He’s been thrown off a number of internet platforms for promoting conspiracy theories, violence towards women and rants about the World Economic Forum. This bunch, led by Klaus Schwab, seem to have replaced the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission as the objects of right-wing paranoia. Tate’s mates have included Alex Jones of Infowars, now facing a $1bn bill for damages for libelling the bereaved parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims as ‘crisis actors’, as well as Paul Joseph Watson, Donald Trump jnr and Nigel Farage.
Eventual things got a bit too hot for him in Blighty, so he fled to Romania. According to the article, 40 per cent of his reason for doing so was to escape rape allegations. He’s also very aware of the promotional benefits of being a controversialist, telling his viewers that if they want their blogs and vlogs to get anywhere, they should aim for a 60/40 mix of friends and haters. After the other platforms got rid of him, he was taken up and promoted by Peter Thiel, an American magnate connected to the Alt-Right. Thiel wrote the foreword for William Rees-Mogg’s Libertarian manifesto, The Sovereign Individual, and, as the head of a private healthcare company, wants a slice of the NHS’ business. He was given a £190 million contract by the Tories before this was challenged over breaches of the commissioning process.
To some it all up, he sounds a very nasty piece of work. The article is well worth reading for exposing the connections Tate has to the extreme right, including the people who want to privatise the NHS. And far from appearing like an innocent self-help guru advising men and boys how to reclaim their masculinity constructively, he instead seems to be a violent misogynist.
Sorry I haven’t been posting much over the last few days. I had a hospital appointment Thursday and although it wasn’t anything serious, I haven’t felt much like posting anything online afterwards. But I felt I had to post about this. I was watching one of the videos from the New Culture Forum yesterday. It’s the cultural offshoot of the Institute of Economic Affairs and has been set up to defend traditional British culture from left-wing ideas and ‘wokeness’. In this particular video, they were discussing various topics that had arisen over the past week. One of these was a video produced by biracial Tory Calvin Robinson about how British children’s education is being ruined by left-wing teachers pushing Critical Race Theory and so on. Now I do agree with them about Critical Race Theory. I think it’s just a form of militant anti-White racism based on a mixture of Marxist legal theory and postmodernism. It considers that all Black people are automatically oppressed because of their colour, while White people are privileged and should be made to feel ashamed and humiliated because of this. It’s divisive and I see absolutely no value in it whatsoever. But Critical Race Theory is only one of their targets. The broader target is the teaching profession itself, which they decided is far too left-wing and needs to be comprehensively attacked.
My mother was a primary school teacher, and I did my first degree at a teacher training college, which has since become one of the new universities. I realise that this is nearly forty years ago, and I honestly don’t know how much has changed or not. I did an MA in history in 2004 and then a Ph.D. in archaeology at Bristol university, graduating ten years ago. My experience of university is therefore dated and limited. But this contradicts some of the assertions that the New Culture Forum were making. They claimed that 85 per cent plus of teachers were left leaning. Perhaps they are. And so, the arch-Tories claimed, they wished to indoctrinate children with woke doctrines like CRT, Postcolonial Theory and so on. They also asserted that they were generally indoctrinating people with the left-wing attitudes that only people on the left support the NHS and are caring.
Now my experience is that teachers, whether left or right, go into the profession for the simple reason that they want to stand up before a class and teach. And what they want to teach is the traditional academic subjects – the three ‘Rs’, history, science, geography or whatever. They don’t want to push Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory or Queer Theory. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, feminism and so on used be part of what was called ‘the hidden curriculum’, the set of values that the educational system sought to impart to its pupils. From what I can see, the overt teaching of issues like anti-racism was imposed from outside the school by the local education authority and involved outside groups. After the 1981/2 riots, for example, the school at which my mother taught was visited by such a specialist group to teach the children to be anti-racist. As far as I can make out, this came from above, from the council or LEA and that neither the school nor its headmaster had anything to do with it. Today there are concerns about schoolchildren in Brighton being taught Critical Race Theory, and one man has taken his child out of the local school there and was protesting against it. But the leader of Brighton council is a member of the Green party, and this seems to be part of Green party policy down there. The New Culture Forum, as could be expected from a group of high Tories, declared that it was the fault of the unions. Well, the National Union of Teachers, from what I can remember, is very hot on anti-racism and so on, but there were a variety of different teaching unions, and I don’t think they were all the same.
As for universities, some lecturers are admittedly very left-wing. Others are, or used to be, Tory. And others keep their political and religious opinions out of the classroom. With some of the ‘woke’ courses that are being made mandatory at certain universities, such as anti-racism awareness for freshers, the impression I get is that they are being imposed by the administration. This seems to be largely a response to criticism from the Black community. Blacks tend to get lower grades than Whites, and so universities have been under pressure since the 1980s to implement affirmative action programmes to admit more Black students by lowering the grades required. And it’s also being done in response to complaints that Black and Asian staff and students also suffer from racial abuse and so on. This aspect does indeed come from the Black sections of the unions, as reported by the Guardian.
The impression that teachers have been indoctrinating vulnerable little minds with Communism has been around since the days of Thatcher, when her government started a moral panic about Peace Studies. I think this latest round of political suspicion and witch hunting is partly a result of concerns across the Atlantic about the promotion of Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter and Queer Theory in schools. There have been a number of videos put up on right-wing YouTube channels commenting on TikTok videos by gay/trans teachers informing the world about their sexuality and how they’re trying to teach their class about it, as well as news stories and controversies about Drag Queen Story Hour. But while this goes on, I’m really not sure how widespread it is. I’ve watched videos that have claimed it’s near uniform because of the influence of these doctrines and left-wing staff on the American teacher training courses. But I’m not American, and my contact with the American education system has been limited to American exchange and other students at the universities and colleges I attended.
I am also unsure how far the local authorities can be blamed for the schools in their area teaching left-wing doctrines like Critical Race Theory. I was at school just before the National Curriculum came in, when schools had far greater freedom to teach what and how they chose. This freedom has been limited by the National Curriculum. Also, schools have been part-privatised by being transformed into academies. This system was intended to take them out of local authority control. But if schools are teaching subjects like CRT and Queer Theory, it has to be due to the wishes of the academy chain itself. These are private companies, which makes it difficult for Tories like the New Culture Forum to blame the state or left-wing local authorities. It’s no doubt why they’re blaming the teaching unions instead.
So, what are their solutions to all this? They discussed home schooling but rejected that on the grounds that working class parents have neither the time nor the books required to do it. They concluded that if the education system could be rescued at all, there had to be a battle with the unions ‘like the miners’ strike’.
This is very ominous.
I’m not in favour of anyone imposing their own personal political opinions schools. But I’d say that the most pressing issues in education aren’t about Critical Race Theory and so on. They’re the constant issues of underfunding and poor pay for teaching staff, lack of resources and teaching materials and inability to retain staff. There are concerns that children’s, and particularly boy’s personal development and educational performance is being harmed by the lack of male teachers. But one solution to that would be to raise salaries to a level where they would be attractive to men, where they felt that it was worth their while economically to go into teaching rather than a better paid profession. Or launch a campaign that would otherwise attract more men in the same way that other, traditionally masculine professions, are trying to attract women. As for universities, the main issue there in my opinion is the extremely high tuition fees. As far as I can see, the money from these isn’t going to teaching staff, who can be quite poorly paid. One of my friends was an assistant lecturer for a time in the ’90s. It all seems to be going on the bloated salaries of university chancellors and administrators. These seem to me to be the real issues, though I’m not discounting the harm done by the introduction of specifically woke courses. And whatever the New Culture Forum may say, no, the Tories do not support the NHS.
Their talk of attacking the teaching unions is frightening, because it means another Tory assault on state education generally, at a time when education is in crisis because of Tory privatisation policies.
Get the Tories out, renationalise schools and get rid of tuition fees!
Going through YouTube this past week I found a couple of videos tearing into Scientific American for publishing a piece of pseudo-science to support the trans ideology. Scientific American has been going for over a century now, and has been one of the major magazines popularising science and explaining scientific discoveries and speculation to the mass of ordinary folks. I used to read it, on and off, along with New Scientist until I went off both c. 2007. That was when Dawkins wretched book, The God Delusion was published, and the New Atheists appeared to try and convince the public that religion was incompatible and fundamentally opposed to science. Real historians of science rejected it long ago, although they recognise that there have been periods of tension. The view that science and religion are opposed comes from the works of three men, one an academic at Harvard in the late 19th century. Against them are all the scientific discoveries made by people of faith down the centuries. For Christianity, I suggest James Hannam’s excellent book on medieval science, God’s Philosophers. As for mathematics, I’ve got a collection of early mathematical texts which I picked up from a secondhand bookshop. These texts go from the ancient Egyptians through Babylonia, ancient Greece, Rome, Judaism, China, Japan and India, as well as some of the great Muslim mathematicians. Many of them begin with a dedication by their authors to their God or gods. Unfortunately, the editors at New Scientist and Scientific American don’t share this view, and the editorial line became very atheist. So I simply stopped reading them. Unfortunately Scientific American’s scepticism hasn’t prevented it from publishing what I believe can only be described as pseudo-science in the name of promoting trans rights.
Brett Weinstein and his wife, Heather, biologists who oppose the postmodern pseudery now being promoted throughout academia and society, put up a video in which they tear to pieces an article published by the magazine which declared that western civilisation only believed in a single sex, the male, until about 1880. I think Matt Walsh has also made a video about it. It’s clearly nonsense, as the Weinstein’s show simply by stating the number of times men and women both appear in the Bible as evidence that people that long ago knew full well about the gender binary. The Weinsteins also point out that something can exist in nature long before it’s recognised by science. For example, the coatimundi was long considered to be two different species. There were the coatis, who were solitary animals, and the mundis, who were social and surrounded by their infants. Then biologists came to realise that the two species were actually just the two sexes of the same creature. The solitary animals were the males, while the social creatures with infants were the females. Brett Weinstein also points out that at one time people thought that the two sexes of the elephant seal were different species, simply because they looked so different from each other.
I think I know where the nonsense that western science didn’t recognise the gender binary until the late 19th century comes from. Postmodernism rejects empiricism and scientific examination and research in favour of discourse, examining what others have said about a particular issue. In the case of Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory and so on, this is done through the ideological lens of Marcel Foucault, in which ideology and discourse are functions of power relationships. For Queer Theorists, or at least those supporting trans rights, the scientific view that there are two biological sexes is a western, patriarchal construct intended to exclude trans people and so support White, heterosexual male dominance.
It seems to me, and I confess that I haven’t read the article, that the author has done this by basing their view on Aristotle. Aristotle, or at least the ancient Greeks, believed that the female body was merely an imperfect form of the male. This has rightly and understandably annoyed feminists ever since. But Aristotle and the other philosophers never denied that their were two sexes, male and female. And I am absolutely sure that the Renaissance anatomist, Andrea Fallopi, who discovered the fallopian tubes and the clitoris, and who named the vagina, knew what a woman was and that women and men were physiologically different.
I think the purpose behind the article has been to provide a scientific justification for transpeople being true members of the sex with which they identify or have transitioned. If the sexes are not distinct, then someone who believes themselves to be a member of the opposite sex, contrary to their biology, can still be seen scientifically as a member of the opposite sex.
Now I don’t deny that there are people, who believe that they are in the wrong body, and wish to conform as far as possible to the opposite sex. I also believe that such people deserve appropriate medical care and should have the same respect and freedom from abuse and discrimination as everyone else. But the sexes are still distinct biologically, and the denial that this is so is ideology, not science.
As for the Postmodernists denying the historical existence of something simply because it wasn’t recognised historically, a prime example of such thinking is in the Sokal and Bricmont book, Intellectual Impostures. This is a case in 1974 or -5 when French Egyptologists and doctors unwrapped the mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh. Examining his remains, they concluded that the man had died from tuberculosis. The Postmodernists, however, disagreed, because no such disease was known to the ancient Egyptians. Of course the fact that a disease wasn’t recognise, doesn’t not mean it didn’t exist. It only means that the people of the time didn’t know what it was.
I find it worrying that this article claiming that biological sex differences are only a recent invention has been published. There have been too many occasions in the past when ideology has been allowed to corrupt science. Examples include the racial, ‘Aryan’ science of the Nazis, and Lysenkoism in the USSR, based on the ideas of Stalin’s favourite scientist, Lysenko. Other examples of bad science include lobotomy operations to treat mental illness and monkey glands to rejuvenate men. This last involved implanting slices of monkey testicles into those of human men in order to make them become younger and more virile. In fact it resulted in the men taking this treatment developing syphilis, as the disease is endemic in the type of monkey from whom they took the bits of implanted gonad.
I am afraid that articles like this, and the pseudoscience they promote, will cause great harm, albeit with the best of intentions. There are at the moment a number of detransitioners suing the doctors who treated them and who recommended transition. They believe that they were deceived by them. I’ve no doubt that for some people suffering from the condition, surgical intervention may well be appropriate and necessary. But this must be proper physical and psychological tests.
The publication of such ideologically based pseudoscience threaten the proper treatment of those who suffer from the very condition such articles aim to help. And so they must be strenuously rejected.
Kali Fontanilla is a Trump-supporting, Black American Conservative. Naturally I don’t support her Conservatism, but she does say some very interesting things about race. In this short video, she explains why she definitely doesn’t support Black Lives Matter.
She states that the movement is founded on the assumption that the cops go out hunting Black people to kill. But in fact Black cops shoot more Black people than their White comrades. It if was simply a case of race, this would be the opposite. She also states that all but one per cent of the people shot are armed, and that 95 per cent of them are men. If it was simply a case of racism, she argues, then we’d see more Black women shot. But the reality is that men commit more crimes than women, and more Black men commit crimes than White men. She also states that in 2020 there’s a 59 per cent rise in cops being murdered. And in 2021 all the headlines about White cops killing Black suspect disappesred.
Another Black Conservative said something similar in one of the books I was reading recently. They cited statistics from various American police forces to show that the cops waited longer before pulling a gun on a Black suspect than on a White, more cops were shot by Black perps than the other way round, and that in New York the police stopped and searched less Black suspects than had been racially identified as the perps.
That said, there have been some terrible incidents. There have been several cases, if I remember correctly, where boys have been shot for carrying toy guns or the Black suspect was otherwise unarmed. There’s a long history of hatred and suspicion between the police and Blacks, as well as attempts by the force to combat racism in its ranks. But I’m quite prepared to believe as a general picture that Black Lives Matter’s assumption that the cops are killing Black suspects from sheer racism fundamentally false. As for Black cops killing more Blacks than White, I have heard stories over this side of the pond of the odd Black policemen, who hated other Blacks. But that might be a result of the particular hatred they get from their own community for joining the force.
I felt I had to put this up, because the fact that activists and feminist scholars like Karen Davies and Jennifer Seiland, the author of magazine article Davies discusses, have to refute this nonsense show how far the ideological fantasies of Queer Theory have poisoned genuine political, feminist and ethnological discourse. Davies is a Black American lady, who’s a sharp, trenchant critic of the transgender ideology and its supporters. She’s a musician, schoolteacher teaching young children, and has also worked in the care sector with the mentally ill. She has very strong, uncompromising views on both the transgender ideology and transwomen which has led to disputes with other gender critical campaigners, like Graham Linehan. However, her views and criticisms are informed by medical scholarship, and she cites the appropriate medical and psychiatric literature to support her case.
In this video she approvingly discusses a piece in the feminist magazine Reduxx by Jennifer Seiland ‘Black Women Are Women. Men Are Not’, concentrating particularly on Seiland’s attack on a frankly weird and bonkers idea going around Trans supporters and ideologues. This is that Africans did not understand biological sex and the gender binary before it was imposed on them by White, Christian Europeans. Davies herself makes good, and sometimes glaringly obvious points against this nonsense. Like Africans obviously knew about the gender binary and the biological differences between the sexes, like everyone else. It would have partly been a survival issue. You wouldn’t let heavily pregnant women go hunting where they were particularly vulnerable to animal attack. Rather, you’d give them other, lighter work to do and leave them with other people in attendance to help them when the baby arrived. She points to great African civilisations like ancient Egypt and asks how anybody could build such a great culture and its monuments, if they were too thick to know the difference between men and women. She also raises the point that people in the ancient world travelled widely long before European colonisation, and that the Vikings probably got to Africa. She also makes the feminist point that not only were Black women frequently denied their humanity, but so were women generally. She compares the attitude that African’s didn’t understand the difference between men and women to nonsense she was taught at Roman Catholic school that Africans didn’t have language until the Europeans arrived.
This all seems to be a development of one of the arguments used by the supporters of the transgender ideology that non-western cultures have a third gender, and that White westerners, as racist colonialists, have imposed their narrow view that there are only two sexes on them. Now some cultures do have a third gender category for people, usually gay men, who are seen as somehow neither male nor female. A few years ago the Indian hijras – eunuchs – were campaigning for official recognition as a third gender. One book I read years ago about Polynesian society described the gay men in those societies, who grew their hair long, dressed as women and took up feminine occupations like laundry. Going further back, Herodotus in his Histories describes how the men of the Scythian aristocracy often dressed as women and did feminine tasks.
Not all cultures outside Europe have such ideas, however, and in many African cultures the sex roles can be very marked. For example, among the Dowayo of Cameroon the smiths are men but their wives are potters. Basket-weaving is also feminine occupation,. The British anthropologist, Dr. Nigel Barley, in his book The Innocent Anthropologist, describes the general hilarity he caused among his hosts when he tried his hand at basked making. To me the statement that Africans didn’t know about biological sex seems to be a new mutation of the old, and thoroughly discredited anthropological belief that primitive peoples, like those of Papua New Guinea, didn’t understand the father’s role in conception. They believed instead that a god or spirit had entered the woman’s womb. In fact later research showed that primitive peoples know very well that you need a biological man as well as a women to make the next generation.
I also wonder how anyone can make such a ludicrous statement that it needs to be refuted by a feminist scholar like Seiland, when there’s a wealth of popular literature about Africa and its peoples that would easily show otherwise. All you have to do is look for the books on Africa in the local library or good bookstore. And there’s some excellent LGBTQ+ literature which discusses homosexuality and related issues around the world. One of these is A Gay History of the World. This describes the case of an African queen, who overthrew her husband, took on male dress and ruled as king. She also had a harem of male wives, who wore women’s clothes. It’s definitely queer, but it seems to me to be a result of very strong traditional ideas about the sex roles. Only men can rule as kings. Therefore, any woman that tries to rule, has to make herself culturally a man, which means dressing in masculine clothes and having a harem of wives. Though as it seems the queen was heterosexual, these were men rather than women.
As for what Davies was taught in Catholic school about Africans not possessing language until it was brought to them by Whites, I honestly have no idea where that notion came from. It’s the kind of rubbish Fascist groups like the National Front used to say. But European explorers and linguists from the 19th century, and no doubt well before, knew that Africans had their own tongues. The Victorian explorer Richard Burton gives a complete description of the language of the east African city of Harar with grammar and extensive vocabulary in his account of his journeys in that part of the continent. In Wanderings in West Africa he talks approvingly of the Mandinko people and the language of the Kru, asking why Brits dealing with them can’t use their own, perfectly good indigenous names rather than give them nicknames like ‘Three-Fingered Jack’. I’m not saying such attitudes towards African languages is common in the church. I know it isn’t. One of the other voluntary workers at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum told me once how he’d heard mass in Swahili when in Africa. It seems pretty clear that this bizarre idea that African’s didn’t have their own languages isn’t general to Roman Catholics, but just held by those particular teachers in Davies’ old school.
I do wonder at the intellectual damage assertions like the idea that Africans had no notion of biological sex are doing. At the moment they’re held by a small, highly ideologically driven elite, but it seems to be an attempt to deny biological reality for ideological reasons. And I fear that it will be enforced by the same people that protest against and sack academics like Kathleen Stock, who simply assert that sex and gender are based in biological reality, rather than mental or cultural constructs.
Before I go any further, I want to make it absolutely clear that I am very definitely not trying to sneer at, deride or stigmatise anyone’s sexual identity, sexual orientation or gender presentation. I also condemn wholeheartedly persecution and discrimination against anyone, simply because they are gay, trans or whatever.
However, I am greatly concerned that the expansion of trans identification is being driven by other, malign factors rather than the unfortunate feeling by some individuals that their biology does not match their true identity. In the case of trans identification, I am afraid this is being pushed for ideological reasons and for the benefit of the medical industry without due care for the young patients. I am terribly afraid that many young people are being misdiagnosed and put on a path to drug and hormone treatment and very possibly surgery, that they don’t need and that will lead them to damaged health. I am also afraid that trans identification has now become a social contagion, in which psychological vulnerable young people have convinced themselves they suffer from what used to be called gender dysphoria, in the same way eating disorders emerged and spread in the past. And I am also deeply concerned about the malign influence of Queer Theory in deliberately destabilising young people’s gender and sexual identities for reasons purely of political ideology.
Added to this are concerns about the possible effects of chemical pollutants, which is the subject of the video below. Odin’s Men is a YouTuber, who posts videos laughing at and criticising woke people on Tiktok, especially those with particularly remarkable appearances. But here’s he’s commenting on the finding by a Black American scientist, Tyrone Hayes, whose research has shown that mad conspiracy theorist Alex Jones had a point when he said he didn’t like them putting chemicals in the water that were turning the fricken frogs gay.
Dr Hayes was tasked by his employer, a biochemical company Synergen, to investigate the possible effects of their pesticide, Atrazine, on frogs. There seems to have been a ‘nod and a wink’ from his employers that, of course, he wouldn’t find any. But Hayes did. He found biological male frogs developing multiple ovaries. This occurred even in specially biologically engineered amphibians that had no female genetic inheritance. This occurred at the levels Atrazine was normally present in the environment. The video compares the denials of the biochemical industry with those of the tobacco companies decades ago that nicotine was addictive. Odin’s Men then goes further, talking about the plunging levels of testosterone in western men and speculating whether this is also caused by such pollution. And finally he wonders if the increase in LGBTQ+ identification among young people to near 40 per cent is also due to it.
Amphibians are in crisis all over the world because their skins are water permeable and so more vulnerable to soaking up and absorbing the pollutants in the environment. Scientists have produced research for at least a decade that frogs are developing reproductive anomalies and disorders tied to environmental pollution. And as far back as the 90s there was concern about the dropping fertility levels in western men. This has also been linked to falling testosterone levels and supposedly shrinking genitals. The chemicals supposedly responsible for this are phthallates, a form of plastic that’s supposedly in everything. This is extremely controversial, and back in the ’90s the Wessex Sceptics over here in Britain took time out from criticising crop circles and the National Lottery to try to debunk it. However the fall in western male fertility appears to be well-established, regardless of the right-wing nonsense that claims it’s all due to people eating soya products instead of meat. And certain fertilisers do impede normal sexual development. Back in the early- and mid-80s the Observer published an article condemning the sale of such a chemical to Pakistan and other developing countries. The fertiliser was banned in the west because of a number of harmful side-effects. One of these was irreversible sex changes in girls.
There is a difference between the effects of these chemicals and gay and trans identification. The chemicals are having a physical effect in feminising the test frogs and turning them intersex. As far as I am aware, though, sexual orientation and gender identification are mental matters. There are a number of theories about the origins of homosexuality. These range from evolutionary theory, in which same-sex desire has emerged in nature because it confers a positive advantage on the animal at a species level. For example, one theory claims that it has emerged in humans and primates as it would allow the dominant male to keep a harem of fertile females without competition from other males, who could still nevertheless serve him. Some scientists have said that it is genetic in origin or perhaps is caused by abnormal levels of testosterone in the womb. And then there was Freud and his idea that it was all caused by dysfunctional family relationships, which I believe has now been discredited. I can’t say I’m convinced by any of these theories, and it may be that gay and trans identity isn’t due to chemical pollution.
But it now seems beyond question that toxic chemicals are being released into the environment which are damaging the ecosystem and which may be affecting humans. And you don’t have to be a mad conspiracist theorist like Jones to be worried about that.
Just to lighten this post up a bit, someone took Alex Jones’ notorious rant about gay frogs and turned it into a rave video on YouTube. Here it is from Placeboing’s channel.
One of the other books I’ve ordered from Amazon, and which I’m reading at the moment, is Helen Pluckrose’s and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (Swift Press 2020). Pluckrose and Lindsay are two thirds of the group, with Peter Boghossian, of academics that are actively seeking to lampoon and refute the various pseudo-academic disciplines that have emerged from Postmodernism and Critical Theory. These theories, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, Disability and Fat Studies, promise to help make society fairer, but instead are doing immense damage, including to the very groups they profess to want to help. They consciously reject the Enlightenment ideas of reason, evidence, science and the individual and universal. This is particularly clear in Critical Race Theory, which denounces as a failure the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, with materialist Critical Race Theorists arguing instead for segregation. CRT, Postcolonial Theory and Intersectional Feminism also reject ideas of evidence and reasoned argument on the grounds that this is a discourse created by White men to keep everyone else down. Instead they promote myth, story and lived experience as authentic, non-White ways of knowing that should takes its place. Those advocating this nonsense include Novara Media’s Dalia Gebreal, who was one of the editors of Decolonising the University a few years ago. In the case of the Postcolonialists, their view of an irrational east is exactly the same as the western Orientalists they decry following Edward Said’s Orientalism. And the real social activists in India and elsewhere in the Developing World are very much aware of it. I’ve only read a few chapters so far, but from what I’ve seen, Lindsay and Pluckrose show again and again that these Theories are only making matters worse. Real progress for Blacks, gays and other marginalised groups has come from evidence, reasoned argument and universalism – the idea that there are universal human rights, which should apply to everyone regardless of race, creed, gender or sexuality/ gender identity.
In fact some of these ideologies are actively malign and reactionary. Postcolonialist activists, for example, do not lend their voice to activists in Saudi Arabia or India protesting the oppression of women and LGBTQ people in those countries and the Middle East. It’s because the ideology itself actively defends and promotes indigenous, non-Western cultures and their worldviews, which may vehemently reject modern ideas of feminism and sexual tolerance. They’re only interested in oppression in the non-Western world when this is due, or can be blamed on, colonialism. This is explains why Barbara Barnaby, the British head of Black Lives Matter, in her speech to a fringe Labour party meeting a few years ago, condemned the toppling of Colonel Gaddafy and the consequent enslavement of Black Africans, but had nothing to say about the revival of indigenous slavery further south, such as Uganda. Nor did she mention oppression by Black African and other non-Western regimes. Instead she demanded that refugees automatically be allowed into ‘Fortress Europe’ because ‘You oppressed us under colonialism’. But overt colonial rule in many countries ended sixty or so years ago, in the 1950s and 1960s. These nations achieved their independence, and the poverty, corruption and oppression these nations have experienced since then have been at the hands of indigenous rulers. A far better argument, for me, would be to say that, as former imperial subjects, refugees from these nations deserve to be given sanctuary in Britain, and some activists have used this argument. But Barnaby’s silence about oppression and violence by indigenous non-Western regimes is part of the general refusal of Postcolonial Theory to confront this brutal reality.
The book’s blurb runs
‘Cynical Theories argues that struggles for social justice are strongest when they are founded on respect for evidence, reason and free and open debate. It deplores the harm that closed-minded Social Justice ideologues, cancel cultures and social media pile-ons are doing to the cause of social justice and liberal democracy itself.
Pluckrose and Lindsay demonstrate that only through proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas can we challenge this harmful orthodox, and offer practical strategies to combat it.’
After the Introduction, it has the following chapters
Postmodernism ‘A Revolution in Knowledge and Powers’
Postcolonial Theory ‘Deconstructing the West to Save the Other’
Queer Theory ‘Freedom from the Normal’
Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality ‘Ending Racism by Seeing It Everywhere’
Feminisms and Gender Studies ‘Simplification as Sophistication’
Disability and Fat Studies ‘Support-Group Identity Theory’
Social Justice Scholarship and Thought ‘The Truth According to Social Justice’
Social Justice in Action ‘Theory Always Looks Good on Paper’
An Alternative to the Ideology of Social Justice ‘Liberalism without Identity Politics’.
This book supplies a much-need critique of these thoroughly pernicious theories, which regrettably have gained considerable ground on the Left and in academia. Instead of bringing people together and actually helping those they purport to want to help, they are actually creating more division and hatred. James Lindsay, one of the book’s authors, recently described his experience of appearing on Dr. Phil, an American talk show, to confront various Critical Race Theorists on Benjamin Boyce’s YouTube channel. When they asked him what he would recommend instead to tackle racism, he replied that it should be colour-blindness, where people are rewarded on ability. He said they looked at him as if they’d sh*t themselves.
If we are to progress as a people and species, it can only come through reason, logical argument and a concern for objective truth, as well as genuine liberal universalism, which sees everyone as equally deserving of human rights.
And that means dumping these destructive and pernicious pseudo-ideologies.
I’ve said several times that as the failure of Thatcherite free market capitalism increases, the Tories will try to divert attention away from it by concentrating instead on issues of race and immigration. And this is has happened in the shape of the right-wing YouTubers Alex Belfield and Sargon of Gasbag and the Lotus Eaters. For example, the privatisation of the utilities ain’t working. This is why Jeremy Corbyn in his brilliant 2019 manifesto argued for their renationalisation. Just over 50 per cent of the British public agree with the renationalisation of the electricity companies with only 14 per cent opposing. Keir Starmer is one of those, as he tied himself up in knots on the Andrew Marr show this Sunday denying that he had ever said he was in favour of nationalisation while he very much had talked in favour of common ownership in his campaign to become party leader. Mike in his piece about it asked what common ownership meant if not nationalisation. Well, there are other forms of social ownership, such as municipalisation. When Blair dropped the commitment to nationalisation – Clause IV – from the Labour constitution back in the 1990s, his apologists stated that it didn’t mean that other forms of common ownership would be ruled out and specifically pointed to municipalisation. On the other hand, people have said that despite these arguments, it was very clear what the removal of Clause IV meant: the end of Labour as a socialist party and a commitment to private enterprise. Conference challenged that as well when they voted overwhelmingly for return of the electricity companies to state ownership.
This is clearly an embarrassment to Starmer, especially as the motion was passed not just by the traditional Labour left, Corbyn’s supporters, but also by members of the party’s right. Which means that people across the party have woken up and realised that the private ownership of the electricity sector isn’t working.
So, how are popular right-wing YouTubers like Belfield, who makes much of having 300,000 supporters, and the Lotus Eaters responding to this decision? Well, from what I can see, they ain’t. Instead Belfield and the Lotus Eaters are making much of the statement by one of the hosts at the Conference yesterday that too many white men were putting their hand up, and that this didn’t represent the diversity of the people in the hall. Belfield and the Lotus Eaters both extensively discuss and criticise diversity and racial issues. Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, is an avowed anti-feminist. You’ll remember that he gained notoriety a year or so ago over a tweet he sent to Jess Philips telling her that he ‘wouldn’t even rape her.’ I think this is quite deliberate. They seem to be trying to appeal to the same constituency as UKIP, of which Sargon was briefly a member and which he helped to destroy. When he joined, everyone who didn’t have such strong views about race or migration immediately denounced his recruitment and left. Academic studies of UKIP, such as for example the book, Revolt on the Right, have found that the party’s core supporters were socially conservative older White men of 50 +, who felt left behind by Blair’s multicultural Britain. At the same time, the core supporters of the Republicans and especially Trump in America were supposed to be angry White men. Which explains why Belfield and the Lotus Eaters have seized on the statement by a conference host which sought to minimise them.
When not exploiting the call for fewer questions from White men, Belfield has been playing up personalities. Keith Vaz has returned, and this has been criticised by Belfield after reports of bullying by him. Belfield also attacked him for supposedly looking the other way when Asian workers in Leeds were being paid starvation wages by their Asian employers, a situation also ignore by Black Lives Matter. It’s a fair point, although the local Labour MP has pointed out that she repeatedly tried to get something done about it but was ignored by the local council. He also repeated the criticisms of Angela Rayner for calling the Tories ‘scum’. Well, it is unparliamentary language, but Nye Bevan, the Labour politico who set up the NHS and welfare state, famously called the Tories ‘vermin’. He was angry about the real poverty and suffering their policies had caused, and to which we’re returning thanks to Cameron’s, Tweezer’s and Johnson’s determination to drag us all back to the Victorian age. And then there’s Claudia Webbe, who stands accused of using misogynistic language against someone and threatening to attack them with acid. This is serious stuff, but it’s a distraction from the serious point that a majority of the party at Conference has decided that electricity privatisation is a failure. This is a direct assault on Maggie, and so can’t be tolerated.
The fact that Belfield and the Lotus Eaters aren’t arguing against electricity nationalisation, which they would have done at one time, shows that part of the Tory media realises very well that it isn’t working. They still support it, but have no arguments for keeping it in private hands.
So all they can do is make personal attacks and hope people will ignore the rest.
I’ve commented before attacking Critical Race Theory and its rejection of conventional academic standards and norms, as well as its dangerous anti-White intolerance. But CRT is only one of a number of similar disciplines that can be grouped together under the title of ‘social justice’ ideologies that share a similar outlook and origin. These arose in the 1980s and 1990s from Post-Modernism and represent a real attack on the fundamental concepts and values of Enlightenment liberalism, individualism, science and objectivity.
The Grievance Studies Hoax
I found the video below on YouTube, entitled Applied Postmodernism – How ‘Idea Laundering’ Corrupting American Universities. It’s of a talk given by the scholars Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose at the Aspen Jewish Centre in Aspen, Colorado, on 30th July 2019. These three were so fed up with the quality and venom of ‘social justice’ pseudo-scholarship that they devised the ‘Grievance Studies’ hoax. They submitted 20 spoof papers to various postmodern academic journals, drawing on these disciplines’ previous literature to support deeply morally repugnant conclusions. One of these papers concluded that men should be trained like dogs not to participate in rape culture, while another said that straight White men at college should be trained to the floor to teach them about their privilege. Seven of these papers were accepted and a further seven were under consideration before the group ‘fessed up and they were withdrawn. Not only were these spoof papers accepted, but they were even praised approvingly by the journals’ editors. The reviewer of the paper about treating men literally like dogs called it ‘an important contribution to knowledge’.
Student Unrest at Evergreen College
The group were prompted to stage this hoax by a violent, extremist student protest at Evergreen University. This was one of the least racist universities in the US, but radical students took it over, wandering about campus with bats and dragging people out of cars, claiming that it was intolerably racist. Only one of the academics, Brett Weinstein, stood up to the students. He committed the unconscionable crime of asking them what their evidence was. This was vehemently rejected and Weinstein himself pilloried because the postmodern ideologies that motivated these students does not permit any questioning. If someone simply asks for evidence, or presents any criticism, this is seen as proof of their racism or bigotry.
Two of the academics speaking, Boghossian and Lindsay are American. The third, Helen Pluckrose, is British. She begins the talk by explaining that she was moved to start investigating and opposing these ideologies through her research as a feminist historian. She was interested in 14th century women’s spiritual writing, but was told that her research would not be accepted unless she examined it through the postmodern feminist ideological lens. If she continued pursuing her own ideological independent view, she would be blocked from doing a Masters and a doctorate. She sees herself as being attacked for standing up for the reality of biology and traditional liberal values in the broadest sense. The group are critical of the modern college environment with its safe spaces intended to protect people from encountering opposing ideas. This has created a generation of brittle students, who are unable to cope with opposing ideas when they encounter them.
Postmodern Ideologies of Power and Identity
The ‘social justice’ disciplines they attack and expose are the theoretical humanities which have arisen since the 1990s – Critical Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Queer Theory, disability studies, fat studies and so on, which are all part of the general Cultural Studies movement, which is based on postmodern philosophy. These are founded on the ideas that knowledge isn’t something that exists independently and objectively, but is invented. Western knowledge is an oppressive system of knowledge that has been created by White men through language. It is not objective, but represents instead the universalisation of the values of these elite White men. Instead of seeing society as consisting of individuals, these disciplines see it as composed of different demographic groups with different relationships to power. White men speak with power, women and ethnic minorities have no power. The ideologies are prejudiced against great White men and western knowledge, but are favourable to women’s and eastern knowledge. These different demographic groups have different values. Science is consciously rejected as an instrument of oppression of elite White men. These disciplines demand instead that it should include feelings, personal experiences and cultural traditions. But these demands are made without any supporting rational argument.
Idea Laundering
The term ‘idea laundering’ was coined by Brett Weinstein. Just as money laundering allows criminals to present tainted money as really coming from legitimate sources, so idea laundering allows deeply flawed scholarship to gain a false respectability. It’s the process by which opinions, rather than solid fact, are published in academic journals as established, peer-reviewed research. This is then given further respectability through references in the work of other, succeeding scholars. One of the examples of this Helen Pluckrose cites is the feminist text, Doing Gender. This starts with the idea that men and women are cognitively identical, but have been socialised into different roles. The book has been immensely influential, and has spawned a number of other books with similar titles expanding and applying its ideas. And some of these are absolutely crazy. One of these books states that heterosexual men are only attracted to women because they have been socialised to do so, a complete rejection of the reality of human sexual reproduction. Another example cited is Critical Dietician Studies. This was founded by a group of postmodernists as a venue for their own papers after they were rejected by mainstream journals of nutrition. One of their papers approvingly refers to Lenin for his ideas about nutrition, despite the fact that Lenin is one of the very last people to be considered an authority on it.
Social Justice Movements’ Intolerance
The group state that they weren’t the first people to comment on this poor and highly ideologically driven scholarship, but no-one else knew what to do about it. When another critical academic, Bruce Gillie, tried to publish a paper defending colonialism, not only was it rejected but he himself received death threats. They state that their academic opponents do not play by the conventional rules of engagement. Boghossian later describes how he had someone follow him into a gents’ toilet in order to beat him up, but was fortunately prevented by the presence of Brazilian judo instructor. These highly intolerant ideas aren’t just in academia, but are increasingly found outside it. For example, there was a recent article in the Washington Post entitled ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men?’. The group state that they have received emails and inquiries asking for help from professors, students and others, including a lawyer from the Canadian equivalent of the Bar Association, the EU parliament, and even knitting and hiking groups, which have become divided by these ideologies.
Another part of this new, postmodern, ‘social justice’ scholarship they attack is the notion of White privilege. This is based on Peggy MacKintosh’s Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. This is simply concerned with perceived racial privilege rather than economic or educational privilege. It would not accept that a Black millionaire is more privileged than a homeless White man. These ideas have developed so that it states that the mere recognition by White people that they are privileged isn’t enough. They are actively complicit in it because they are born into and speak with a system of White privilege and oppression. The fundamental attitude is that racism exists everywhere, and the question is never whether it exists, but how it manifests in a particular circumstance.
Personal Politics and Strategies to Tackle Postmodernism
The group state that they aren’t Conservatives. They’re actually liberal atheists, but they believe there should be a place for Conservative scholarship in the academy. They coined the term ‘Grievance Studies’ not to deny that there were genuine grievances, but to look at the scholarship based on postmodernism using particular grievances and issues. This pseudo-scholarship is based on a profound cultural relativism, denies universal values and standards, and the individuals. Pluckrose states that as a feminist historian she wants to examine issues of social justice rigorously without deny biology. But this is impossible with postmodernism.
When asked how they intend to combat these movements, they state that they aim to do so by clearly explaining the issues and providing resources. Lindsay and Boghossian wrote a book together, How To Talk to Someone You Disagree With. Pluckrose is writing a book on the origins of the ‘social justice’ movement. I think someone has made a film about the hoax, as the group several times refer to it and the video seems to be about the panel discussion that followed a screening of the film. Boghossian talks about going into the ‘belly of the beast’, showing the film in colleges and building a movement there. They’re also constructing a website.
One major obstacle is the educational establishment. They state that teaching in the US is now based very much on a postmodern, ‘social justice’ book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This is designed to look for and attack racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry at the expense of factual learning. Another problem is that liberals aren’t pushing back against these ideas as there doesn’t seem to be a good alternative. Decent people don’t want to be seen as against social justice. The issue is therefore to show that this ‘social justice’ scholarship is illiberal by those who genuinely want equality and a level playing field.
Attacks by Opponents
The three are asked about how they have been personally affected by this affair. Pluckrose states that as an independent scholar, she isn’t at the same risk as Boghossian, a tenured academic. Nevertheless she has had her views extremely misrepresented, been called a fascist and had her family’s internet accounts cloned so that trolls can attack her online. Lindsay says that he is also independent and that his experience is therefore almost the same as Pluckrose’s, and that he has lost friends and family. He states he is against racism and sexism, but just wants the scholarship about it to be better.
It is Boghossian who has suffered the most. He states that he is hated by his colleagues at the university, and has been the target of a persistent campaign of harassment and smears. There have been hit pieces on him in newspapers. He has been accused of criminal activities and maltreating his family, who have also been targeted. Less seriously, he has also been accused of supporting Trump and being pro-life, as well as being a Nazi and a grifter. The group give a further example of how this postmodern ‘social justice’ movement is pushing ideology at the expense of fact. They cite a book for maths teachers that urges them to use the subject as a way of indoctrinating students with this ideology.
Social Justice Postmodernism Not as Popular as Appears
They believe, however, that these ‘social justice’ movements are really just a small, but very powerful and influential minority and that it is opposed by many on the left. This is the old economic left and the socialists against the new identitarian left. There is also opposition from liberals, centrists and the centre-right. I think they are quite amused by the fact that, although liberal atheists, their ideas have been adopted by the Conservative religious right and are now taught in Southern Baptist seminaries. But they believe that this small, but highly influential ideological minority is nevertheless exercising a chilling culture. They talk about performative falsification. This is when people appear to go along with ideas they don’t hold, and even become enforcers for them out of fear that they will be targeted otherwise. They talk about receiving letters from students apologising for signing petitions against them, who felt that they would suffer if they didn’t. As far as the universities go, it appears to be the elite universities that suffer the most from this ideology. Pluckrose cites here recent demonstrations at Oxford and Cambridge. The lower tier universities aren’t quite so affected, as they have more students from working class backgrounds, who want practical knowledge and can’t afford to be concerned so much with social theory.
The group believes that these ideas could not have gained their power without the internet. However, they existed in the universities as far back as the 1980s. Postmodernism first arose in the 1960s as a movement by disaffected Marxists to analyse and deconstruct the existing power structures. This petered out as they seemed to be of no practical use. They were taken up again in the 1980s at the tail end of the Civil Rights movement by scholars and activists determined to give them a practical application. An example of this is Kimberley Crenshaw and the Black identity politics, which drew very much on postmodernism.
Regarding the future, Pluckstone has great hope in student groups, who have contacted her to speak to them and send information. There is a counterbalance to the ‘social justice’ movement, but at present it can’t speak. It needs resources and to find others like them. People do need to speak freely about it. University professors want to challenge it, but feel silenced. They describe how they have been contacted by a left-wing psychologist, who wishes to tackle social justice issues, but objects to the way the ‘social justice’ movement handles them. He wanted advice on what he could do.
What Parents Can Do
The group are asked what parents can do to resist this indoctrination. This is an issue that particularly affects Pluckstone, as she is also a parent. She explains that she talks to her fifteen year old daughter about issues like freedom and equality, and that reverse racism and sexism are still racism and sexism. She advises parents that when they get messages from the school stating that they are going to teach diversity and equality, they should ask the school why they are going to teach it that way. This shows the school that they will get pushback if they are too ideological. She states that it is rather different in England, where Christianity is present in schools, but she advises them to concentrate on the rules, which are rather stronger in America, preventing religious or political indoctrination in schools.
The group also advises people to be aware of language, as there are certain ‘trojan horse’ words which smuggle in the ideology. One such is ‘equity’. This does not mean ‘equality’, but simply making up for past injustices. Another code word is ‘critical’, which in this context does not mean ‘critical thinking’. They also recommend the book Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rausch, which is suitable for 12-13 year olds, and which lays on the need to defend freedom of speech. They also attack Robin Di Angelo’s White Fragility as an example of the type of best-selling ‘social justice’ book they oppose.
They also believe that children know when they’re being lied to, and this could result in the baby being thrown out with the bath water. If the teaching becomes too ideological, not only will children reject the ideology, but also the solid teaching in which the ideology is embedded. As an example of how unselfconsciously intolerant ‘social justice’ ideology is, the group describe how they took the twelfth chapter of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which he describes his aims for the Nazi party, and carefully edited it to be about intersectional feminism. This was one of the spoof papers that were successfully submitted to various postmodern journals. In this instance it was taken up by a feminist journal.
A member of the audience suggests that they should produce soundbites that would appeal to fifteen year olds. The group say that they are going to produce a variety of books aimed at beginners’, intermediate, and advanced levels so to be intelligible to different people of all ages and ability. Boghossian also says that he is compiling a ‘turnkey’ syllabus for university professors.
Postmodern Attacks on Medicine
As an example of how this ideology is negatively affecting people, they talk about the use of pronouns. People are now being required to give their pronouns not as a statement of their own gender identity, but to show they are in line with the gender ideology. One of the three talks about how he personally knows one woman, who was a rape victim and very uncomfortable when she was asked what her pronouns were because of her experience. They also describe how cancer researchers have been placed under pressure by pro-fat activists not to say that obesity is a factor in some cancers because this is prejudicial against fat people. At the same time, extreme disability activists have placed medical professionals under pressure to withhold information on autism and deafness because it would be ‘ableist’ not to want to have a disabled child. This shows the power of the movement. When money corrupts academia, it’s immediately recognised and opposed. But this ideological corruption of education is much more difficult to see and so more acceptable. They also state that young people speak the jargon of postmodern social justice fluently, because they are surrounded by it all the time.
I’ve put this video up not to support the Conservative right, but because, as this group has shown, the postmodern ‘social justice’ movement is viciously intolerant and attacks fundamental ideas of individual freedom, dignity and individual worth on which western liberal society is based and which are at the heart of the politics of both the mainstream left and right.
And its because of their intolerance, divisiveness and racism and sexism that these ideas need to be fought by those on the left.
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