James Lindsay Tears Apart Queer Theorist Paper Attacking Childhood Innocence

I hope I’m not boring you with all this, but I thought I should post this video by James Lindsay up as well. It follows his first video attacking Queer Theory and its deliberate grooming of schoolchildren through pornography and grossly inappropriate topics being taught in sex education. Lindsay argued, citing the postmodernists and Marxist writers themselves, that Queen Theory really isn’t about genuinely helping gay, bi and trans children and adults come to terms with their sexuality and find acceptance in society, so that they can lead normal, functioning, happy lives alongside straight people. Rather, it is all about increasing their alienation and making them even more angry and transgressive in order to turn them into a revolutionary mass which will overthrow capitalism instead of the working class. This follows closely Georg Lukacz’s sex education programme in Hungary, which was explicitly designed to use sexual liberation to alienate children from their parents and conventional capitalist society. This was then taken up by the Frankfurt school and played a very strong role in the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s. Lindsay backs up the arguments in his previous video by going through a Queer Theory paper, written by Hanna Dyer, a woman at Carlton University in Canada, that explicitly states this.

Queer Theory’s Rejection of Gay Rights

Early on in the paper, Dyer denounces the recent legislation granting gay people equal rights. Lindsay is not homophobic, even though his attacks on Queer and Critical Theory and calls for those promoting it to be put in gaol make him sound like a very right-wing Conservative. I don’t know what his political views are. He may be a man of the right, but he makes it clear that all parents should come together to combat what is being taught in schools in Social Emotional Learning and Comprehensive Sex Education regardless of politics, race, sexuality and religion. All that should matter is the class ‘parent’. Lindsay states that gay acceptance has been of immense benefit to society. But Dyer attacks it because such liberal legislation will help reconcile gays with the capitalist society they wish to overthrow. This continues throughout her wretched article. Later on she attacks Dan Savage’s video on YouTube, ‘It Gets Better’. Savage is gay, and with another man, produced a video to reassure gay children that even though they’re bullied and have an awful time at school, it gets better when you grow up. People are more accepting. I think this often depends on your particular place in society. Working class culture could be traditionally extremely homophobic, and there is a vicious homophobia prevalent in some parts of Black culture. But in general middle class culture has become very accepting to the point where one YouTuber described how a Conservative friend had completely accepted gay equality. Savage produced his video in response to the high rate of suicide amongst gay kids. He wanted to stop it by showing that ‘It Gets Better’. He released the video on YouTube because he felt schools would resist its message. According to Lindsay, Savage is actually ‘super liberal’. But to Dyer he’s an evil White man – she doesn’t call him a scholar or researcher, just ‘White man’ in order to show how evil he is. Apart from his race, she sees him as a servant of capitalism, trying to stop the revolutionary potential of the gay masses by incorporating them into neoliberalism and promoting upward mobility.

Now I strongly believe that the sooner we dump neoliberalism the better. It is doing immense damage to ordinary working people of whatever, race, creed, sexuality or religion. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to reassure vulnerable gay children that they can still a place as an accepted member of society, who should be able to look forward to the same job opportunities as the rest of us and have the same aspirations to social advancement. And I’d say that attacking a video that genuinely tries to stop gay kids committing suicide is actually evil.

The Attack on Childhood Innocence in order to Promote Radically Alienated Gay Identities

The paper goes on to attack the whole notion of childhood innocence. She hates the idea that children are asexual and proto-heterosexual. Lindsay states that here she comes into conflict with biological fact. Most people across society all over the world are heterosexual. Only a minority are gay. This is aside from any moral considerations that see heterosexuality as more moral than homosexuality. He makes it clear that he supports the teaching that ‘Some people are gay. Get over it’, as Stonewall once said in an advertising programme. Lindsay has said in his previous video that Queer Theorists really don’t like that common sense attitude. Moreover, they see gender and sexuality as identities without essence, social roles people perform rather than are. Therefore they seek to groom children for their role as queer revolutionaries by breaking down barriers and having them sexually experiment. This include the binary oppositions male/female, adult/child. And around the 1hr 14 minute mark, Dyer says this explicitly. Which clearly opens the way to grooming by paedophiles. Lindsay states that children have a very strong belief in these opposition and that he believes them to be biologically innate. He also makes the point that paedophile relationships massively damage the young victims psychologically. A very high number schizoid people have the condition due to childhood abuse. But Dyer seems also to be offended by the biological fact that most people are heterosexual. She wants to changes that, and queer not just gay children, but children as a whole. This is very much how the attacks on heteronormativity have seemed to me, and I’m glad that Lindsay has come to the same conclusion I have.

Later on, she attacks the whole notion of reproductive sex because gay people, who naturally cannot have children through gay sex, cannot achieve the same level of privilege as straight ‘breeders’ in a society that privileges heterosexual reproduction. But this is a revolt against biology, as it is through heterosexual reproductive sex that the human race is perpetuated. Ah, but so too are the mechanisms of capitalist control and repression. Instead the goal should be hedonistic, non-reproductive sex, which she explicitly connects with the death urge through Marcuse and other Marxist thinkers. This is just plain nihilism. Thinking about it, it makes me wonder if Pope John Paul II had a point when he described Enlightenment society as a ‘cult of death’. I think he was wrong about the Enlightenment, but certainly right about these pernicious postmodernist ideologies.

Childhood Innocence Blamed for Racism and Genocide

Naturally, race gets drawn into it in order to produce the broad, intersectional coalition of races and sexualities that postmodernists hope to create as an oppositional front against capitalism. Childhood innocence should be challenged, because it chiefly affects White children. Black children are less innocent, and stereotypically more streetwise. Lindsay says it’s rubbish. Here I think he’s wrong. I think the stereotype is that Black children are tougher, more worldly-wise, and more ‘street’. but that doesn’t mean that their parents don’t want to preserve and guard their innocence just as much as Whites. And apparently childhood innocence is also genocidal. Whites want to preserve their kids more than those of other races, and this is somehow ties in with one of the genuine mass-murderers of the US Indian Wars. This was the general responsible for the Sand Creek massacre, who wanted not only adult indigenous Americans killed, but also to be physically mutilated and their children murdered as well in order ‘to stop lice breeding’. It’s an absolutely horrific attitude and atrocity, but as Lindsay points out, just ’cause someone was an idiot in the past doesn’t mean that everybody who believes in childhood innocence is. She also brings social class into her argument about gay acceptance and queer children, although Lindsay states these are actually non-issues. He also points out that at the centre of all this is are repeated attacks on conventional ideas of childhood development, which stresses that children go through certain stages and that the material they’re given should be age appropriate. Like the books in school libraries that are graded according to suitability for different ages of reader. Dyer talks about getting Queer Theory to influence ideas of childhood pedagogy along with Critical Race Theory. But this isn’t about helping gay children. It’s all about destabilising children’s personalities, to make them angry and disaffected, to make them Marxist revolutionaries determined to destroy western civilisation.

Alex Jones Right about Queer Theory and Transhumanism

At times Lindsay sounds like the mad conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He says at one point that if he goes on reading it, he’ll end up screaming about Satan like the bonkers Texan libertarian. Well, Jones talked a lot of conspiracist nonsense about ‘the globalists’, which is very close to the wretched anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He also falsely accused decent people of being child abusers for the Democrat party, claimed Barack Obama was the antichrist, Hillary Clinton of being possessed by alien demons, a practicing witch and a robot from the waist down, and other nonsense. Like NASA was running a child slave labour based on Mars. Which nobody knew about, least of all NASA, as they took the time to deny it, not least because it would cost $16 billion just to send six people to Mars let alone the legions of kids Jones, or rather, one of his guests, claimed.

But it seems Jones had a point. I’ll admit I had a laugh when Jones ranted about feminism and gay rights being a transhumanist cult to turn us all into sexless cyborgs. But Lindsay says that transhumanism is one offshoot of Critical Theory. The World Economic Forum is made up of transhumanists, who all want to link us to the Net through biological implants so that we will live at least part of the time in Virtual reality. We will own nothing and we will be happy.

This sounds like Star Trek’s Borg to me. In ‘Q Who?’, the Star Trek The Next Generation episode which introduced them, Q transports the Enterprise to system J17, where they encounter and are attacked by a Borg cube that has just finished assimilating a planet. As one of them beams aboard, Q says to Picard, ‘Look at it, Jean-Luc. It’s not a he, it’s not a she… it’s an augmented humanoid.’ But one of the heads of the big American tech corporations is a transwoman and transhumanist, and wrote a paper promoting transhumanism as a feminist project to go beyond gender. And there certainly was a lot of talk about genderless future cyborgs when transhumanism was being discussed back in the ’90s. ‘We are Postmodern Borg. Resistance to Critical Theory is futile. You will be assimilated’.

Destroying State Education Not the Solution

Throughout the video, Lindsay angrily stops his analysis of the text to remind his readers that this is being done by groomers in the sex education now being taught in American schools. This means your children. And this is primarily state schools though some private schools are also involved. He loudly urges people to take their children out of these schools. I see his point. There’s a video by anti-trans ideology activists Kellie-Jay Minshull, in which she goes through some of the material recommended for schools by Stonewall. And it is about sexualising children. One of these is a game in which children put together various body parts and have to guess what sex act may be possible with them. This really is inappropriate. Yes, children should be taught about the changes happening to their bodies and their emerging sexuality in adolescence. And I quite agree that at an appropriate age, children should be taught that some people are gay but should be accepted like anybody else. But this doesn’t do that. It is about breaking down barriers, barriers which are there for a reason. There is an organisation, the Safe Schools Alliance, for parents worried about this form of indoctrination. He also points out that the ideas are very similar to Herbert Marcuse’s proposals for Marxism to take over university education.

But the solution isn’t to pull kids out of state education, as the Conservative right wants. I think the American public school system was founded by Thomas Jefferson, who realised that for America to work as a functioning democracy it needed an educated public. Absolutely. If you destroy public education, you get back to the conditions of 19th century Britain before it was made compulsory. Education was definitely not free, and only the rich could afford to send their children to the public (elite private) and the grammar schools. Working class children could go instead to dame schools, usually run by an elderly woman, hence their name, where educational standards could be very low. Many children couldn’t send their children to school, and so illiteracy rates were much, much higher. Proper state education has made the British public much more educated and informed, though sometimes you wonder.

What needs to be done is for parents instead to fight this indoctrination as hard as they can, so that their children get a proper education and not just indoctrination, whether from the extreme left or the extreme right.

Lab Grown Goats and the Shape of Wombs to Come

I found this photo of goat fetuses growing in tanks filled with amniotic fluid in a Japanese lab in an old an old issue of Scientific American Presents – Your Bionic Future from autumn 1999. It illustrated an article by Tabitha M. Powledge, ‘The Ultimate Baby Bottle’, which had on the contents page the comment ‘Aldous Huxley was right. Artificial wombs are in our future.’ I hope, I really hope that they aren’t. At least, not in the way he portrayed it in Brave New World. In the book, the Fordists have abolished natural reproduction so that everyone is grown artificially in hatcheries. As a result, sex is only for pleasure – and as this is a hedonistic society there are plenty of orgies – and the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are dirty terms of abuse. This is definitely not a society anyone would want to see realised. On the other hand, milder forms of such reproduction have also been suggested. The people of humanity’s first extraterrestrial colony also reproduce in hatcheries in Brian Aldiss’ and David Wingrove’s history of the future, The Third Millennium. And in Paul McAuley’s book, In The Belly of the Whale, the two human species on Fomalhaut also reproduce through cloning in hatcheries, but are placed with surrogate parents who raise them in something like a normal family structure after their birth.

The success of the Japanese scientists in growing the goat fetus’ generated a considerable interest at the time. It was widely predicted, as the Scientific American article did, that this would lead to artificial wombs. In fact there was speculation about possible breakthroughs in such research a decade earlier in the 1980s. About 1984/5 I remember an article appearing in the Absurder which predicted that some day people would be gestated in such devices.

I’ve got very mixed feelings about this. I can admire the scientific skill behind it, and it does touch that part of me that enjoys seeing Science Fiction become reality. I can also see that it would benefit women, who for one reason or another could not carry a baby to term. But I don’t know how women would react to such machines if they became possible. I realise that pregnancy and childbirth are fraught, dangerous times for women and their children. Many women go through everything from the discomfort of bad backs and morning sickness to far worse conditions that may seriously damage their health. The other night there was a piece on the One Show, for example, about the dangers to pregnant women from a condition that causes severe nausea. And then there are the problems and dangers in childbirth itself.

But femininity throughout history has been intimately bound up with motherhood. So much so that in many traditional societies the view of women has been that of baby factories, whose primary role is the bearing and raising of children. Modern feminism challenges this in order to give women the freedom to work outside the home in previously masculine roles and professions. But I am not sure if women would welcome the complete separation of femininity from motherhood. Would women feel somehow diminished, deprived of a vital component of their womanhood, if there was a wholesale move towards artificial reproduction? Part of the psychological motivation behind gender critical feminisms opposition to transwomen being accepted as women is a powerful feeling that this is men usurping and appropriating femininity, while marginalising natural biological women. Reading through some of the comments on Kellie-Jay Kean’s videos, I came across some women talking about the joy they felt as women bearing children. One women said that men’s lives must be so empty because of their inability to do so. Now these are just a few women’s views, but I do wonder how women with a similar attitude would look upon artificial wombs.

I also wonder whether there would be the same strong bond between parents, and especially mothers, and their children if babies weren’t born naturally but collected from the hatchery. I realise that the parents of adopted children are in a similar position, and generally greatly love their children, as, of course, to step-parents. I’m also well aware of the dreadful neglect and abuse some parents inflict on their kids. It’s perfectly possible, therefore, that bringing your baby home from the lab for their first time would have all the emotional impact of a natural birth and that the parental bond wouldn’t be affected. But nevertheless, I wonder.

And I’m also worried that such hatcheries could lead to the further mechanisation of what would once have been considered essential human traits, to produce genuine post-human creatures like the cyborgs of the transhumanists. These could be far beyond us in their capability while at the same time lacking in what we consider to be our essential human natures, like the Cybermen and Sontarans of Dr. Who.

These are deep, ethical issues. But fortunately, they have become pressing just yet, as the promised artificial wombs have yet to appear.

Paul Joseph Watson Butthurt Berserk ‘Cos Piers Morgan Won’t Debate Him

More hilarity now, though it’s unintentional and comes courtesy of Alex Jones’ British pal, Paul Joseph Watson. Jones is the bonkers American conspiracy theorist responsible for Infowars. This was the internet show that told its audience that the globalists were going to take over the world, stripping us of our freedoms and even our humanity. Obama was going to declare a state of emergency and force Americans in FEMA camps, commencing the mass cleansing of the population. The Democrats were all secretly Satanists and paedophiles. They and big business were in league with aliens/ and or demons to take over the world and create the one-world Satanic superstate of fundamentalist Christian end times theology. Barack Obama was declared to be the Antichrist because he smelt and had flies buzzing round him. Hillary was a lesbian cyborg, who practised witchcraft. NASA was running child slave labour camps on Mars. Feminists and gay rights activists are transhumanists, who want to turn everybody into gender neutral cyborgs. They’re coming to take away Americans’ guns. And the government is putting things in the water that ARE TURNING THE FRICKIN’ FROGS GAY.

It’s a fair question whether Jones actually believes any of this rubbish, or is just exploiting it for the sake of viewers. He was one of the major purveyors of the batshit insane conspiracy theories that are a genuine threat to decent political life. Thanks to Jones’, the bereaved parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre have been subject to abuse because Jones declared that the massacre didn’t happen and they were just ‘crisis actors’. A Boston pizza parlour has also been subject to abuse and even an intrusion from an armed man after Jones declared that it was at the centre of a Democrat paedophile ring and that the abuse children were kept in a dungeon in the basement. It isn’t, and there is no basement and no children. The gunman had been taken in by Jones’ bilge, and  had come to free the kids he genuinely believed were imprisoned there. After being shown he was wrong, he gave himself up peacefully. It’s a mercy that no-one was killed.

Thanks to antic like the above, Jones has been thrown off a series of internet platforms so that his public profile, and his income, have taken a massive hit. And Paul Joseph Watson, after hanging out with him, has returned to Blighty. He was one of the three, who managed to destroy UKIP under Gerard Batten. When he and another two internet personalities from the far right, Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin joined UKIP, prompting those of more moderate views to walk out. The party was already losing members to Farage’s latest vehicle for his colossal political ego, the Brexit Party, and the entry of Watson, Benjamin and Meechan just about finished it off.

Coarse jokes have been made about the precise nature of the relationship between Jones and Watson. One theory is that Watson split from Jones because of the latter’s views about Britain’s NHS. One commenter to a video about Jones and Watson jokingly suggested that Watson was over here because he was tired of being the object of the sexual attentions of Jones and one of the others at Infowars. But whatever the reason, Watson is over here, he’s looking for attention, and he’s angry. And to everyone else, it’s hilarious.

Zelo Street has posted up a rip-roaring piece about Watson going berserk at Piers Morgan on Twitter. Watson wants to debate him, but Morgan’s got better things to do like torment the government in interviews, and has simply blocked him. This has sent the man dubbed ‘Twatson’ by his detractors into what Molesworth used to describe as ‘a fearful bate’. And so he’s poured forth a stream of abuse directed at Morgan on Twitter, beginning with this delightful message.

“Cowardly little bitch. Afraid of the fact that I’m more popular and definitely more attractive than you. Mercenary twat. Debate me, you yellow belly crusty boomer sellout fraud cuck wanker dickhead”.

And there’s more, much more. He rants that Morgan is afraid to debate him because he’s more intelligent, youthful and handsome. And his spirit animal is some kind of bird of prey. He’s not a misogynist, because when he was at school his mother and grandmother would beat up any kid who picked on him. Nor is he an INCEL. He has no trouble picking up girls, especially Muslims. That still doesn’t alter the fact that he is anti-feminist, and has very islamophobic views.

One of the staples of comedy is a character massively losing their temper, like Donald Duck in some of the Disney cartoons. There’s a similar comedic value in watching Watson explode at Piers Morgan’s refusal to get drawn into debating him. Although perhaps we shouldn’t laugh. As Frankie Howerd used to say, ‘Oh, don’t mock. Doooon’t mock! It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’  But faced with such a massive tantrum, it’s very had to follow Howerd’s command of ‘titter ye not’.

Zelo Street concludes their article about this with ‘Piers Morgan is, for all his faults, successful and well-off. And Paul Watson … isn’t.’ And it’s sending Watson up the wall to the immense amusement of everyone else.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/prison-planet-manhood-meltdown.html

 

 

Examining Jeanette Winterson’s Ideas on AI and Literature

Last Saturday’s I for 1-2 June 2019 carried an interview in its ‘Culture’ section with the literary novelist, Jeanette Winterson, about her latest work, Frankissstein. This is another take on Frankenstein, with one strand of the book set in the contemporary world and exploring AI, the downloading of the human mind into computers and literature. Winterson’s the second literary novelist, following Ian McEwan, to turn to the world of robotics for their subject matter. I’ve critiqued both of them, based on reviews in the papers, because this comes across to me very much of another instance of ‘literary’ novelists appropriating Science Fiction subjects and issues, while disdaining and ignoring the genre itself.

Winterson’s interview with Max Liu was also very interesting in other respects, and worth reading. While I am not remotely inclined to read her book, and have real objections to some of her statements on philosophical grounds, I also found that there was much that she said, which I agreed with. Particularly about the exploitation of British communities under Brexit.

The Interview

The article, on page 49, was prefaced with the statement Jeanette Winterson talks to Max Liu about AI and why the novel could die if it doesn’t reinvent itself’. It ran

Jeanette Winterson would like to upload her brain to a computer. “It were possibl, I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to find out what it’s like to live without a body,” she says when we meet to discuss Frankissstein, her new novel about artificial intelligence. “I had a very religious upbringing, so to me, the idea that the body is just a house is normal.”

The 59-year-old wrote about her Pentecostal childhood in her semi-autobiographical debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), and her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011). For the past couple of years, she has been reading about AI and robotics at the same time as thinking about Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic, Frankenstein. In her latest novel, the young Shelley appears as a character.

“I started writing about Mary in Italy at the beginning of the 19th century then worked my way to the present,” says Winterson. “There was no point setting a novel about AI in the future, because I wanted readers to realise the future is here. We don’t know how far big money has gone in developing AI, but I suspect it’s much further than we think.”

Winterson believes “we’re living in an ahistorical world where people don’t know how we got here”, the pace of change since the Industrial Revolution leaving us bewildered. “By its nature, reading slows us down,” she says,”so I’m pushing against the acceleration of modern life, creating imaginative space for readers to inhabit. Anybody who can imagine something is in control.”

Her new novel’s present-day characters include Ry, a transgender doctor, and Winterson says: “One of my godchildren identifies as transgender and I’ve been reading a lot about that because I thought I needed to understand. The idea of identity being provisional fed into this novel. Much Western thought rests upon the idea that there is a core self that we can know and perfect, but probably there isn’t.

Ray falls in love with Ron, who is trying to make his fortune by designing sex dolls. Ron plans to exploit post-Brexit tax breaks by opening a factory in Wales. “I hate to see how my class has been manipulated by people who have no thought and no care for them,” says Winterson. “I’m ashamed of my country for turning its back on a European project and choosing nationalism.”

Were she to live for another 100 years, Winterson says she would retrain as a scientist. Does this mean she doesn’t see a future for the novel?

“The novel is only on its way out if it doesn’t change,” she says. “In the 80s, it was too middle-class and too male. Then Angela Carter came along and was so fresh, but she had a terrible time initially. The example of English literature’s conservatism that kills me is when Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac won the Booker in 1984 and Carter’s Nights at the Circus wasn’t even shortlisted. It was the year before I published Oranges and I just thought: “This is so dull.”

In Frankissstein, one character says the urge to write comes from vanity, but Mary counters that it’s about hope. Which is it from Winterson? “My writing is a message in a bottle. I won’t be here long enough to get my brain uploaded, so I’m chucking this message overboard in the hope it will move the conversation on.”

Moravec, Transhumanism and Max Headroom

It would be interesting to find out what Winterson had been reading as her research for her book. My guess it would almost certainly include Hans Moravec and the downloaders and transhumanists. They aim to upload their minds into machines. A little while ago they held a party at which they avowed their intention to meet each other on the other side of the Galaxy in a million years’ time. Which is some ambition. I think Moravec himself believes that by this middle of this century the technology should have been perfected that will allow a human brain to be read in such minute detail that its functions can be reproduced on computer. This was the premise behind the Max Headroom pilot, 20 Minutes into the Future. In this tale, broadcast on Channel 4 in the 1980s, Headroom, a computer-generated TV personality, is created when his human original, an investigative journalist in a dystopian future London, knocks himself unconscious going through a crash barrier to escape the villains. The journo’s body is retrieved, and used by a teenage computer whizzkid, Brice, who seems to spend his whole life in the bath, to create Headroom as an experiment. The character takes his name from the last thing his original sees before he goes through the barrier: a sign saying ‘Max Headroom’.

Sladek’s The Muller-Fokker Effect

I also wonder if she read any of the SF literature about downloading and cyberspace, including one of the first novels to tackle the subject, John Sladek’s The Muller-Fokker Effect, published in 1970. This is about Bob Shairp, a man reduced to date and stored on computer tape. I haven’t read it, but according to Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove in their history of Science Fiction, The Trillion Year Spree,

it is a deeply satirical book, homing in on the US Army, evangelism, newspapers and the like for its target, with an overall sense of fun reminiscent of the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick and Sheckley. (p. 307).

Future Shock and the Global Rate of Change

Winterson’s comment that it was useless to set the book in the future, as the future is already here, is very similar to the remarks I heard about two decades ago by William Gibson, one of the founders of the Cyberpunk SF genre. Speaking at the Cheltenham Festival of literature, Gibson said that the future was already here, it was just wasn’t spread out the same everywhere, so there were parts of the world, such as the developing countries, where it wasn’t present to the same extent as the more advanced West. As for her comments about living in an ahistorical age, where people don’t know how we got here, and the pace of change is accelerating, this sounds very close to Alvin Toffler and his idea of future shock, where societal change is now so advanced and rapid that it is profoundly disorienting. But it is possible to exaggerate the speed of such changes. I can remember reading an article a few years ago, that argued that the impact of modern technology is vastly overestimated. The internet, for example, it was claimed, isn’t half as revolutionary as it is made out as it is only a development of earlier technologies, like the telegram. It’s a contentious claim, but in many ways the most rapid technological, social and economic changes were in the century following Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1937. That was when Britain was transformed from an agricultural, almost feudal country into a modern, industrial society. Britain’s empire expanded massively, communications improved allowed the rapid movement of information, goods and people across the globe. It was the period when new transport technologies like the railway, the automobile, the electric tram, dirigible balloons, aeroplanes and the rocket were created, along with inventions like the X-Ray, electric light, the telegram, telephone, radio and the first experiments in television, and, of course, sound recording and the cinema. Contemporary technological advances can be seen as refinements or improvements on these, rather than completely new inventions.

Transgender People and the Question of Core Personality

I also have objections to her comments about whether or not there is a core, human personality. I’ve no doubt that one argument against it is that many people would be very different if they had had a different upbringing. If they’d been born into a different class, or allowed to study a particular subject at school or university, or if they’d decided to pursue a different career. And, obviously, if they’d been born a different gender. But twin studies suggest that people do have some aspects of their character determined by their biology rather than their upbringing. And I don’t think she makes her argument by pointing to transpeople. As I understand it, many transpeople believe very strongly that they have a core personality or nature. It’s just that this is at opposition to their biological gender. Hence their desire to change. It isn’t simply that they simply decide at some point that they want to change their sex, which would be the case if it was simply the case that they had no core personality. But perhaps Winterson’s godchild is different.

Computers and the Existence of Self 

I’m also suspicious of the idea, as it sounds rather close to the ideas of Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmoore that consciousness is an illusion and that the brain is simply a meat machine for running memes, discrete units of culture like genes are discrete units of biological information. On the other hand, when she says that existing as a disembodied entity on a computer doesn’t seem strange to her because of her religious background, she’s in agreement with Paul Davies. In his book, God and the New Physics, he stated that he’s prepared to accept that life can exist outside the body because of the way computers could be used to simulate human personalities. I can remember reading that the wife of one of the leading downloaders was a Methodist minister. He commented about this apparent contradiction between their two disciplines by saying that they were both trying to do the same thing, but by different methods.

The Manipulation of the Working Class

I do agree wholeheartedly, however, with Winterson’s comments about how her class is being manipulated by people, who give them no thought and no care for them. The idea that the creation of tax breaks for businesses after Brexit would allow an amoral entrepreneur to build a factor for sex robots in Wales is all too credible. Just as I agree with her about Britain turning it’s back on the EU, though I also have strong criticisms of the European Union. But Brexit has been and is being used by the Tory extreme right and its related movements, like UKIP and Farage’s noxious Brexit people, to manipulate the working class and exploit them. If you look at what Boris Johnson and Farage want, the privatisation of the NHS to American private healthcare firms is very much on the table.

Conservatism, Sexism, Literature and Literary Snobbishness

She was also right about the conservatism and sexism of the literary world in the 1980s. Private Eye’s literary column attacked Hotel du Lac for its snobbishness at the time. And the Orange Prize for literature was set up because it was felt that women were being unfairly excluded from the main literary prizes. However, the remarkable success of women writers in winning the mainstream awards has also, in the view of Private Eye a few years ago, also called into question the reason for Orange Prize. Why have a separate prize for women when that year the lists were dominated by female writers? And as for Angela Carter, I wonder if some of the problems she had didn’t just come from her writing feminist magic realist tales and fairy stories, but also because the genre SF/Fantasy crowd liked her. Flicking through an old SF anthology I found in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham yesterday, I found a piece by her about literary theory along with pieces by other, firmly genre figures. A few years ago Terry Pratchett commented that the organisers of the Cheltenham Festival looked at him as if he was going to talk to his fans about motorcycle maintenance, and he was certainly subject to appalling snobbery by the literary critics when he started out. I think it’s therefore quite possible that Carter was disdained by those who considered themselves the guardians of serious literature because she was too genre. But I also wonder if Winterson herself, despite her deep love of Carter’s work, doesn’t also have the same attitude that sees genre fiction as somehow not proper literature, as she, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and the others write.

I have to say that I don’t see the death of novel being anywhere near imminent. Not from looking along the shelves at Waterstone’s, and particularly not in the genre fiction, crime, horror, and SF. But it says something about the apparent lack of inspiration in literary fiction that it is turning to SF for its subjects. Winterson said some fascinating things in her interview, but to me, genre SF still did AI, robots and downloading first and better than the mainstream novelists now writing about it.

 

Yay! David R. Bunch’s ‘Moderan’ Now Back in Print

Bit of good news for fans of classic SF. Looking through the Cheltenham branch of Waterstone’s last week, I found that David R. Bunch’s Moderan was now in print. This was published in 1971, and is really a series of vignettes originally published in small magazines, as well as the big SF mags Amazing and Fantastic. These are set in a future in which organic humanity has decided that its reached the end of its natural evolution, and to evolve further it must transform itself into machines. This process is described as it affects the hero, Stronghold 10. The style is superficially sympathetic to heighten what the reality of what this new, cyborg humanity has become: immortal, but paranoid with each stronghold at war with their neighbours.

Brian Aldiss gives as sample paragraph of Bunch’s prose style, which explains the background to the novel, in his and David Wingrove’s history of SF, The Trillion Year Spree:

Now, to turn tedious for a time, this is what happened. Flesh-man had developed to that place on his random Earth-ball home where it was to be the quick slide down to oblivion. All the signs were up, the flags were out for change for man and GO was DOWN. To ENDING. Flesh-man was at the top, far as he could climb as flesh-man, and from there he was certain to tumble. But he had the luck to have these brave good white-maned men in the white smocks, the lab giants, the shoulders, and great-bulged thighs of our progress (what matter if they were weazened, probe-eyed, choleric scheming, little men sometimes – more often than not, REALLY?) authors of so much of man’s development and climb to that place where he was just due to die, expire, destroy himself and his home at this grand stage of development to make new-metal man and set him in the Strongholds upon the plasto-coated Earth that had been man’s random and inefficient home. New-metal replaced flesh (down to the few flesh-strips and those, we hope, may soon be gone) the bones were taken out and new metal rods, hinges and sheets put in (it was easy!) and the organs all became engines and marvellous tanks for scientifically controlled functional efficiency forever. YAY! Don’t you see?! Our Scientists made of life-man (the VERY-STRANGE-accident man) essentially a dead-elements man, one who could now cope with eternity, but he certainly was not a dead man. AH! Heavens no! He was alive! with all the wonderful scienc3e of the Earth ages, and just as functional as anyone could wish. YAY! science, take your plaudits now! You’ve shown what was meant from the beginning for the VERY-STRANGE-accident man. (p.324).

Aldiss states that it’s a technophobic piece in the SF tradition of questioning technological progress that began with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Moderan was out of print for a long time, so I’m looking forward to reading it some time. Bunch also wrote poetry in an avant-garde style very much like his prose, though in verse. A collection of his pieces, of which only one or two were SF, The Heartacher and the Warehouseman, was published in the 1990s. The title poem is set in the Moderan world, and is about one of these cyborgs coming to a warehouse carrying his pump in his heart. He complains that he – and all the other cyborgs – have no heart. The cyborg warehouseman, suspicious, retreats behind his armoury of weapons, informing him of all the cyborg bits and pieces they have, like hearts and mechanical fingers. But he fails to understand the man’s real complaint – that their civilisation has no heart in the metaphorical sense. The warehouseman drives the Heartacher away, but wonders what will happen to him as he retreats back into his cubby-hole.

It’s one of those pieces that was acutely relevant in the 1990s, when there was much talk among the chattering classes of transhumanism and cyborgisation. It was the decade when Radio 3 broadcast the series Grave New Worlds examining these possibilities through interviews with writers, artists and scientists, including Paul J. McAuley, J.G. Ballard and the Australian performance artist, Stelarc, who really has tried to turn himself into a cyborg in performances in which he wired himself up to the net, so that images found online would work his body automatically through galvanic stimulators some Borg organic puppet, and by giving himself a third, cybernetic arm. It’s still relevant as prosthetic limbs continue to improve. While these are an immense benefit to those, who have lost their real limbs through accident or disease, it does raise the question of how far this process can go and humans become the cyborgs of SF. This was the central question David Whittaker was pondering when he created Dr. Who’s cybermen. Bunch’s novel also seems to have influenced one of the writers of Dr. Who Magazine way back in the ’70s. One of the comic strips, Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman, was about a cyberman, who had some how retained his emotions and compassion. The story was set on the planet ‘Moderan’. And in the 1980s the British space scientist, Duncan Lunan, expressed concerns that people, who were heavily reliant on medical machines suffered a loss of creativity when he explored the possibility of similar mergers between humans and machines in his class Man and the Planets.

I’m glad that this lost classic is back in print. But still more than a little annoyed that it, and other SF works like it, are overlooked by the literary crowd in favour of those by ‘literary’ authors like Ian McEwan. Sorry to ride this old hobby-horse again, but a few weeks ago there was an interview with McEwan in the I. The newspaper mentioned to him that Science Fiction fans were upset about him denying that his book was part of the genre. McEwan repeated his sentiment, saying it wasn’t SF, but was based on him considering real world issues. Well, so is much Science Fiction, all the way back to Frankenstein. Aldiss has praised it as the first real work of Science Fiction as it was based on science as it was known at the time. This was Galvani’s experiments making the severed legs of frogs twitch and move through electricity. McEwan’s attitude shows the basic contempt of many literary authors and critics for the genre. They’re keen to borrow its tropes, but sneer at it as essentially trivial fantasy, unlike the serious stuff they’re writing. Much SF is, and doesn’t pretend otherwise. But there is a very large amount which isn’t, and which deserves to be taken as seriously as so-called ‘serious’ literary works like McEwan’s.

 

Maoist Rebel News on Alex Jones Cursing Trump for Syrian Airstrikes

This is very interesting, and it made me think slightly better – but only slightly – of Alex Jones, the mad right-wing conspiracy theorist and his wretched internet show, Infowars. In this clip from Maoist Rebel News, host Jason Unruhe comments on a little piece of video which shows Jones screaming and cursing Trump for the airstrikes that hit Syria at the weekend. It was clearly shot before Jones went on air, so I assume the footage must have been leaked by someone.

Jones is one of the tin-foil hat brigade, who tells the world that there is a conspiracy by ‘the globalists’ to establish some kind of one world superstate and destroy all personal freedoms along with nation states. It’s standard right-wing conspiracy theory stuff, of the type that’s been a part of the right-wing paranoid fringe since at least the ’70s. Jones identifies the ‘globalists’ with the international business elites, who are under the control of demons or interdimensional aliens. Also involved in this are liberals, socialists and feminists. As for gay rights, they’re a transhumanist space cult to create a new race of genderless cyborgs and deprive us of our humanity.

Obviously, no-one has actually told the gays that. Or indeed, the producers and writers of Dr. Who. Since Russell T. Davis revived the show about ten years ago, it’s been very gay friendly. Which isn’t surprising, as Davis is not only gay himself, but way back in the ’90s made his name with the gay soap/ drama series, Queer As Folk. It’s also quite feminist, in that it’s been doing its best to break the stereotype of the Doctor’s female companions as just being there to scream and have things explained to them by the Doctor. The Time Lords are shown to change genders as well as appearance when they regenerate. The Master regenerated as a woman, and reappeared as Missy. And the next Doctor is going to be female as well.

But this liberal approach to sexual orientation does not mean a rejection of sexuality. Aside from the deep emotional bond between Rose Tyler and David Tennant’s Doctor, which saw Rose eventually settle on a parallel Earth with a human duplicate of the Doctor, there’s the Cybermen. Part of the horror of these monsters is the fact that not only have they had their humanity stripped away and replaced with steel and plastic, but they’ve also been deprived of their gender. They’re mechanical, neuter creatures, devoid of emotion, and determined to perpetuate themselves by turning humans, if not all humanoids, into themselves. All you have to do to see Jones is wrong about gay rights and transhumanism is simply watch a few episodes of Dr. Who.

Jones was initially a very enthusiastic supporter of Trump. He gave him much airtime when the orange buffoon was campaigning for the presidency. Jones thought that Trump was an outsider, who would defeat the globalists and drain the swamp of corruption engulfing American politics.

He’s been gravely disappointed. Trump has carried on with pretty much the same policies as his Republican and corporatist Democrat predecessors, and has, if anything, been even more corrupt in giving government posts to his friends and family, including positions where they would enjoy an unfair advantage as private businesspeople.

Trump’s decision to launch airstrikes against Syria provoked a particularly vehement reaction from Jones. Jones is very much a man of the right, but from here it looks like he belongs to that strain of American Conservativism which states that the country has absolutely no business interfering in other countries’ internal affairs. it’s why some American Conservatives were against the Iraq invasion, including a senior female Pentagon colonel. It’s peculiar, but some Libertarians can be very critical of American foreign policy and its programme of increasing tension with Russia, which can make them seem a bit more left-wing than they actually are.

Of course, Jones doesn’t go the whole way, and wake up to the fact that the reason Trump’s bombing Syria is because of American capitalism and the greed of American multinationals to conquer and exploit yet another middle eastern state, as well as the Neocons to destroy another threat to Israel. Instead he rants about how its all the fault of liberals, Democrats and other members of the left.

Unruhe makes some very valid, pertinent points himself in his comments on Jones’ screams of rage. He states that Marxists realise that the problem isn’t just individual capitalists, but with the system as a whole. But Jones’ anger at Trump shows how profoundly Conservative he is. Jones believes the present system is perfect, and that it’s only gone wrong because of a few individuals. This, Unruhe says, is the psychology behind conspiracy theories, such as those which see the world’s problems as being due to the Illuminati, or, in an anti-Semitic variant, the Jews.

He’s absolutely right on this point. The stupid, malign conspiracy theories which claim that there is a global plot by the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Jews or some other clandestine group, is an attempt to explain the failure of capitalism and laissez-faire economics, without challenging them. They’re seen as perfect, and so if they don’t create the freedom and prosperity their advocates promise, it must be due to some group operating outside the system and trying to pervert and destroy it.

I don’t agree with Unruhe when he says that individual figures aren’t of importance, and that what matters is the system as a whole. There are clearly good and bad employers and some Tories are definitely far worse than others. The present structure of society isn’t perfect, but the extreme right, like the current Tory party and the business people who donate and support it, are making it far worse. They need to be turfed out of office immediately.

In the meantime, here’s the video:

Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones Defends the Size of Trump’s Penis

Okay, I apologise for the crude nature of this post, but it’s weirdly fascinating and gives a bizarre insight into the mindset, not just of Alex Jones, but of much of the Republican party in America.

In this clip from Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski talks about a compilation video one of his viewers sent in, of the various times Alex Jones, the mad conspiracy theorist behind the Infowars internet show, defends Trump from the accusation that his manhood is of less than impressive size.

As Kryten said of Rimmer in Red Dwarf, ‘Oh for a world class psychiatrist!’

This all started with Ted Cruz telling the crowd during the campaigning for the Republican nomination that Trump had tiny hands, and that this meant that certain other areas of his anatomy were also correspondingly small. Mind you, Trump had just claimed that Cruz’s father was responsible for the assassination of J.F.K., which is actually a far worse accusation. My guess is that most people watching Cruz make the accusation probably took it for what it was – a particular low, ad hominem attack, and nothing more. But it’s clearly got under Jones’ skin. Hence the ranting in the video about how well-endowed Trump is, against the lies put out by the media.

Kulinski goes on to discuss how Jones has turned from a critic of the establishment, to its most fervent propagandist through his support of Trump. He likes Trump. It’s as if Trump has cast a voodoo spell over him, as Kulinski describes it. When Obama was president, Jones declared that he was responsible for all manner of conspiracies. Now Trump’s in the Oval Office, the president isn’t responsible for any of those. It’s always the people around him.

He points out just how much of an establishment shill Trump is. He’s doing exactly what his backers in Wall Street and big business want, and is impoverishing ordinary Americans for their corporate profit. He’s the enemy of the middle Class. But to Jones Trump can do no wrong.

Kulinski also discusses some of the other lunatic statements that Jones has made. Jones went on the Joe Rogan Show, where he raved about interdimensional demons and aliens, and claimed that there was a war going on in the political elite between paedophiles and real men, ‘who eat steaks, drink whisky and like women’. Kulinski makes the point of how ridiculous this is as the standard for judging who’s one of the good guys. It means that various truly repulsive Republicans, who have backed every war launched by the presidents, are good guys, merely because they’re heterosexual and have those tastes in food and drink. He also goes on to point out how Jones’ conspiracy theories are demonstrably wrong. Like Jones’ claim that Obama was going to declare a state of emergency, and have everyone rounded up and imprisoned in FEMA camps. Well, Obama’s been and gone, and it never happened. Even worse was Jones’ statement that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged at the pretext for taking Americans’ guns away. He doesn’t mention it here, but this did result in grieving parents being accused by Jones’ viewers of being ‘crisis actors’, and that their children weren’t really shot and killed. Kulinski points out that the legislation that was proposed in the aftermath of the massacre to prevent further outrages like it were a ban on certain types of automatic weapons, magazines of a particular size, and uniform background checks. But the ban on automatic weapons and magazines never got through, because the Republicans blocked it. As for the background checks, this was passed, but was watered down to the point where there are a million loopholes in it. So if Sandy Hook was staged as a ploy to deprive Americans of their firearms, it hasn’t worked.

In fact, Jones’ rants say something about the psychology of part of the Republican base, and the visceral fear of castration that some of them seem to have, associated with socialism, liberalism and feminism. The Republican party stands for a very traditional conception of the sex roles, in which men are expected to be aggressively masculine. The gun culture is part of this. Much of the rhetoric by the Alt Right is about how alpha male they are, compared to all the beta male cucks in mainstream society and the left. When Trump was campaigning for the presidency, Jones did a broadcast about how ‘alpha’ Trump was, and how he’d been having ‘transcendent’ conversations with him. Which, in addition to these comments defending the size of Trump’s genitals, add a kind of homoerotic undercurrent to his attitude to Trump.

Several of Jones’ rants are about the threat to masculinity and biological gender posed by feminism, the UN, and the gay rights movement. In one rant, he declared that the gay rights movement was ‘a transhumanist space cult’ dedicated to removing biological gender and turning us all into genderless cyborgs. Which I’ve no doubt surprised an awful lot of gay people. He also claimed that UN doctors were going to come to cut men’s testicles off. One of the internet news commenters sent up this raging paranoia in one of their vlogs, stating that no, Obama was not going to have them castrated and put in FEMA camps, where they would be forced to carry around greased up lesbians.

Jones’ rants about the size of Trump’s manhood are ridiculous, but they do show the real insecurities about masculinity in the Republican party and the Alt Right. Jones and others like him really do see liberalism and feminism as emasculating movements, which can only be combated by powerful, aggressive alpha males. Hence their support for Trump, and the bitter anti-feminism within the Republican party itself. And not all of those, who hold such views are men. One of those, who has vociferously attacked feminism, and denied that women should have the right to vote is Anne Coulter. And Kulinski makes the point that these genital obsessions have also been played out in the theatre of international relations. Like when he told Kim Jong Un that his nuclear button was bigger. Trump’s concern, and those of his supporters, to show how ‘alpha male’ he is, aren’t just ridiculous, they’re an active danger to the safety of the entire world. As are the stupid conspiracy theories about aliens, paedophiles and FEMA camps promoted by Jones and his Infowars team.

Secular Talk: Alex Jones Rants about Liberal Butch Lesbians Eating Brains

Before I get to the serious stuff today, here’s some comedy from the TV lunatic asylum that is Alex Jones and Infowars. In this clip from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski comments on an unhinged rant from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in which he gives his well-thought out and deeply considered opinions on female sexuality, sexual violence and cannibalism. And like almost everything else Jones says, it’s as a mad as a hatter.

Jones rants that butch lesbians really want to be the macho bad boy, who beats women up. Women actually like macho bad boys, who beat them up, as shown by the success of the book 50 Shades of Grey. If women can’t get men to beat them up, they’ll turn to butch, lesbian women. Who are, of course, all liberals, and will then take them down into their basement, where they will cut open their skulls and eat their brains.

As Kulinski himself points out, no, they won’t. That never happens. He has never been to a meeting with other liberals, like Jimmy Dore, Ro Khanna and the like, where, after discussing politics, they have decided to retreat to their secret dungeon to eat the contents of someone’s skull. It might have been done once by an apolitical serial killer somewhere, but never by anyone on the Left.

But the rant does creepily reflect on Jones himself, as it is disturbingly too detailed. Listening to it, there probably isn’t a judge, who wouldn’t issue a search warrant for Jones’ own basement.

Kulinski also mentions the other side of Jones, that amongst all the nonsense and sheer, right-wing paranoia and lunacy, there were things that he had exactly right. He was right about America starting imperialist wars and the exploitative conduct of the multinationals. But he’s now gone on to pushing insane conspiracy theories and stupid rants like this. He emphasises just how stupid and ridiculous this particular diatribe is by comparing Jones to genuinely great thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Socrates and so on. Well, that’s how some of Jones’ followers perceive him, even though the absolute opposite is true, and the true dimensions of Jones’ tiny intellect are shown very clearly in the comparison.

It’s clear here that Jones has been watching too much Silence of the Lambs. And specifically the sequel in which Lecter escapes, captures the corrupt head of the FBI and eats his brain while the man’s still alive and conscious.

Even though it’s unhinged, the rant also says something serious about the American lunatic fringe’s attitude to female sexuality. They really do believe that women are biologically driven to strong male figures, especially men who treat them badly. You find that a constant source of complaint from the anti-feminist denizens of the Manosphere, like Davis Aurini. In one of his videos, Aurini rants about how modern women are ‘the most decadent sluts since the Fall of Rome’. Which is quite a claim, and not even remotely true. Many of these guys seem to be deeply sexually frustrated. They can’t get girlfriends, and so, rather than there being something wrong with them, there has to be something wrong with women.

There are women, who find bad boys sexy. And unfortunately there are women, who do go from one abusive relationship to another, and actively defend the men, who hit and maltreat them. It’s a real problem for those genuinely concerned about women’s welfare and safety, including the police officers, who are called in to sort the violence out, only to find that the victim does not want to leave or press charges against her abuser.

But clearly this is very much not true of all women. As for 50 Shades of Grey, the book’s a fantasy, and the violence and domination in that has its male counterpart in the pornography about whip-wielding dominatrices. And just because people like reading about such practices, doesn’t mean that they actually want such a relationship in reality, for the same reason that the millions of SF fans, who enjoy films about alien invasions really don’t want creatures from outer space to invade.

As for the ranting about butch lesbians, that comes from Jones’ anti-feminism and homophobia. In a previous rant, he sputtered that gay rights was a transhumanist space cult to create genderless human cyborgs. Jones does seem to be obsessed with castration and emasculation. There’s one rant where he declares that UN doctors were coming to cut men’s testicles off. And one of the left-wing commenters on YouTube remarked that he seemed to be afraid that liberals were coming to castrate men, and force them into FEMA camps, where they would carry around fat, greased-up lesbians. It’s a lurid image, and Jones hasn’t quite said that, but it’s a fair reflection of his views.

It’s massively distorted, but Jones’ rant does say something about the American Conservative attitude to sex and gender. Much Republican rhetoric and ideology is about defending traditional gender roles, in which women stay at home to raise children, while the men are the aggressive heads of the household. Liberalism, Socialism and feminism oppose this traditional family structure, or at the least state that women and men should be free to choose different roles if they wish. But to American Conservatives, this is a direct attack on masculinity itself. Hence Jones’ ranting about UN doctors coming to castrate American men. It also seems to form part of the hysteria surrounding gun rights. Americans have the right to own guns, which empower men to defend themselves and their families. Liberals want to take these guns away, or regulate them, and this is seen as another attack on traditional masculinity.

It’s debatable how much Jones actually believes in the really mad stuff he rants about. Sam Seder has said that he’s seen Jones at political and media gatherings, where he’s perfectly calm, lucid and reasonable. In a recent dispute with his wife over custody of their children, Jones’ lawyer stated that he was a ‘rodeo clown’, who didn’t believe any of the crazy nonsense that his ex-wife was afraid would disturb their children, who lived with Jones at his home and TV studios. Looking through the number of videos that are on YouTube, of Jones ranting and raving, which are actually posted by Infowars, and described as rants, it seems to me that Jones doesn’t believe in the really crazy stuff he rants about. But he is aware that it draws people into his show, and so acts up for the camera and his audience. Others have suggested that Jones really is that mad, but he’s just got enough self-awareness to realise how it looks to others, and to exploit that.

Even though it’s hysterically and grotesquely exaggerated, Jones’ rant does say much about the very real attitudes towards female sexuality and gender roles in American, and for that matte, British Conservatism. You can find much the same comments about the evils of feminism uttered by the Kippers, several of whom became notorious for their comments denying that women should leave the home and go to work. It’s a grim worldview in which women, despite decades of feminism and female empowerment, secretly hanker after strong, dominating men, who’ll keep them in line. It forms part of the misogynistic attitudes of the anti-feminist Men’s Right’s movements. And while Jones himself certainly doesn’t condone violence towards women, this attitude could legitimise the horrific levels of domestic violence against women in American, and for that matter, British society.

Jones’ rants are funny, but underneath the lurid stupidity, they express a very disturbing mindset, which in its fundamental attitudes, isn’t remotely funny at all.

From the JFK Files: CIA Planned False Flag Attack from USSR

This is another interesting little piece from Jason Unruhe at Maoist Rebel News. Unruhe, sporting a black and orange Mohican, reports that amongst the other recently declassified documents relating to JFK, there were details of a false flag operation planned by the CIA to start a war with Russia. The agency wanted to convert a couple of American planes so that they resembled, at least from a distance, Soviet MIG fighters. Or alternatively, they would use real MIGs purchased from countries outside the Warsaw Pact. The planes would be used to stage an attack on America, which would then be blamed on the Russians.

Fortunately, the plan was never put into action. The costs of converting the American planes was much too high, at over a million dollars for each plane. Technical experts stated that it would be impossible, and the results would not be convincing except from a distance.

Unruhe points out that this shows how far the American military was prepared to go – to start a war that would easily have ended up in a nuclear inferno – in order to attack a nation that had defied American imperialism.

In fairness, American imperialism wasn’t the only issue involved here. The Communist states established by the Soviet Union were dictatorships, and alternative, competing political parties and organisations had been suppressed by force. But it’s also fair to say that what also terrified the Americans, and other, western leaders, was that an aggressive alternative to capitalism had emerged. In the 1950s under Khrushchev standards of living in the USSR rose to such an extent, and the economy prospered, that the Americans were seriously afraid that the USSR would overtake America as the richer, more affluent society. Hence the determination to find any means of discrediting Communism and destroying the USSR.

And this appears to be just one of a number of false flag attacks that the CIA dreamed up to blame on America’s enemies elsewhere in the world. A little while ago I remember posting up a piece about how the CIA also planned a series of bomb attacks in Miami and other cities in Florida, which they hoped to blame on Castro’s Cuba. All in order to start a war there, and restore the brutal Bautista regime, which Castro had overthrown.

There is now a section of the American population which really, really doesn’t trust their government. At it’s most extreme, this milieu is represented by people like Alex Jones, who rants about how the globalist elites are somehow in a weird alliance with evil aliens, or demons, and planning to destroy the world and turn the survivors into genderless transhuman cyborgs. All through socialism and feminism and with the use of FEMA camps. Many others simply don’t believe that Islamist terrorists were responsible for 9/11, and instead think that it was a false flag attack conducted by their own government with the intention of starting a war.

In fact, the line that attempted to connect Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attack was a lie. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it, and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda hated Hussein’s secular Iraq as much as they hated America. The ultimate responsibility for 9/11 lies with the Saudis. 17 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, and the operation was planned and funded by people very high up in the Saudi political hierarchy. But this was far too inconvenient for Bush and later Obama to reveal to the American public, and so they suppressed those pages of the report into the attack.

Given the numerous false flag attacks that the American military has planned and carried out against its own people, including the Gulf of Tonkin incident which provided the pretext for the Vietnam War, it isn’t even remotely surprising that so many Americans are highly sceptical of the official stories about 9/11.

Alex Jones: KKK Are Leftist Jewish Actors Creating Division

I blogged a few days ago about a report on one of the American left-wing internet news shows about a particularly odious comment about Charlottesville from the conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones. Alex Jones is the head of the conspiracy internet show, Infowars, and its website, Prison Planet. As I’ve discussed many times before, Jones believes – or pretends to believe – in all manner of outre conspiratorial ideas. At their heart, however, is his unwavering belief that the ‘globalists’ in charge of politics and industry are paedophile Satanists, who worship and are possessed by demons, and are intent on enslaving and destroying humanity. Their ultimate aim is to create a one-world state. Among their weapons are socialism, feminism and gay rights, which he has described as ‘a transhumanist spacecult to create a genderless human being’. Oh yes, and they’re intent on taking away good, freedom-loving Americans guns.

In this clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, co-host Michael Brooks plays the clip from Jones’ Infowar broadcast in which he talks about how he protested the Klan. Jones states that back then there was no Antifa protecting him. He’s clearly a bit miffed at that, though depending how far back he was protesting – Jones has been around for a long time – the organization as such may not have existed back then. Brooks wonders why Jones was protesting. Was he protesting against their racism, or because he thought they were a front group funded by George Soros?

And then Jones gets very sinister. He claims that when the hoods came off, the Klansmen were all FBI infiltrators, played by ‘leftist Jewish actors’. He then states that they were so Jewish, they looked like the cast of Seinfeld. And concludes that Leftist Jews are posing as the Klan in order to create division.

Brooks and his team joke about Jones’ statement about the supposed actors impersonating the Klan looking like the cast of Seinfeld. Brooks states that the show had the weirdest portrayal of New York. They were no Black people, but also no inbred WASP-ish types.

I’m sure I don’t need to go into how dangerous and sinister Jones’ comments are to the readers of this blog. But just to make it absolutely clear, this is verging dangerously on the stupid, genocidal conspiracy theories at the heart of Nazism. Hitler believed that ‘Marxist’ Socialism – meaning everything from the Communist party to the reformist SDP and trade unions – and capitalism were both Jewish strategies for enslaving the Aryan race. The modern variant of this is that the Jews are still intent on establishing themselves as the rulers of the world, and are attempting to destroy the White race through racial intermixing, and the promotion of homosexuality and other forms of depraved sexuality, including Rock and other Black musical genres.

Now Jones hasn’t promoted these long discredited and murderous theories yet, but by talking about ‘leftist Jewish actors’ attempting to create division, he’s not very far away.

And especially as the stupid theories of government collusion with extraterrestrials produced a further theory in the 1990s that the American and other governments were cooperating with the aliens to enslave humans. These theories, at least those promoted by the infamous Bill English in his book, Behold a Pale Horse, drew extensively on the Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is the spurious document at the heart of many of these theories of Jewish world domination. It’s supposed to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders outlining their plan to seize global power and enslave gentiles. It has inspired Nazis and Fascists all over the world. It was even supported by the right-wing press in Britain, until some of them woke up to how fake and dangerous it was, and turned against it.

The Protocols of Zion are absolutely fake. They were put together by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, in order to encourage the last tsar, Nicholas II, to persecute the Jews even more harshly. Nicholas II believed in the old blood libel, that Jews murdered Christians during Passover and used their blood in the matzoh bread eaten at this Jewish holiday. He had a young man, Beilis, repeatedly tried for this non-existent offence, to the point where even some of his most anti-Semitic advisors realized that it was discrediting his regime.

English and the other conspiracy theorists took care when citing the Protocols to try to make their ideas seem more acceptable by excising, or rather, explaining away the Protocols’ anti-Semitic content. Where the text said ‘Jews’, they claimed it really meant ‘Illuminati’, the 18th century conspiratorial group under Adam Weishaupt, which infiltrated the Freemasons. The Illuminati have been blamed as the secret actors behind the major political events of world history, such as the French Revolution, and are intent on destroying Western, Judeo-Christian culture. One of the female leaders of the British Fascist movement in the 1920s was a very strong advocate of these claims. I can’t remember if it was Nesta Webster or Rotha Orne Linton. One of the two, anyway. Whoever it was, she was an alcoholic, who had been given this privileged information by the spirit Duc de Orleans, one of the aristocrats involved in fighting the French Revolution.

I think the John Birch Society in the 1960s also claimed that the Illuminati were responsible for the decline of civilization and the rise of Communism, so that today there is a distinct subculture around the world of ultra-Conservative people, who really believe it. Many of those, who believe in the existence of the Illuminati genuinely aren’t anti-Semites, and would probably be horrified if you called them that. But by citing the Protocols in his stupid UFO conspiracy theory, English did much to rehabilitate them. One bookshop in the north of England even stocked the wretched thing because of this.

Jones calls the ‘globalists’ he thinks are, in Jon Ronson’s phrase, ‘the secret rulers of the world’ the Illuminati. I don’t think he’s anti-Semitic, but by promoting these absurd views he’s coming dangerously close to the real, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that form their basis. The right-wing political scientist, Daniel Pipes, in his book Conspiracy Theories, discusses how these theories first blamed the Freemasons when they emerged after the French Revolution. During the 19th century the Jews were introduced into them as allies and collaborators of the Freemasons. The final revision came in the 20th century, when the Jews were blamed as the prime cause of the liberal revolutions and left-wing dissent, displacing the Freemasons.

You can see from this that it’s only a very short step from Jones’ ranting about the Illuminati, who include ‘Leftist Jews’ as just one of the groups collaborating with them, to the full bilge of The Protocols.

This isn’t just an American problem. People have access to the internet all over the world, so that I’m sure Jones has viewers in many different countries. One of his co-hosts, Paul Joseph Watson, is British, and he’s also had David Icke on his show. I’m therefore very show that he has more than a few followers in Britain. He was even interviewed over here by Andrew Neil, who was far less than impressed with his sanity when Jones started ranting about gun rights.

I don’t know how many people honestly take Jones seriously. Certainly there are any number of videos on YouTube taking the mick out of him, using carefully edited excerpts from his show. These show him ranting nonsensically, including one where he screams ‘I am a fluoride-maddened chimpanzee’.

But at this point, the laughter has to stop. It’s beyond a joke. Jones is becoming dangerous. Not to the ‘globalists’ – the real corporate heads, who run multinational industries responsible for enslaving millions in sweatshops and trashing our planet’s already fragile ecology. He already embraced one, when he had Trump himself come on his show and gave his support to the orange buffoon during his election campaign.

He’s a danger to ordinary people, and particularly the Jews. It starts with them, before going on to the other racial and political groups Nazis and Fascists hate and fear – people of colour, gypsies, socialists, communists, trade unionists, gay and transgender folk. Other religions or sects, which are deemed to be subversive and dangerous. The Nazis persecuted either the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Seventh Day Adventists – I’ve forgotten which, because they wouldn’t accept Hitler as a secular messiah. They and Mussolini also banned the Freemasons, and Fascist Italy also carried out a campaign against the Waldensians, a Protestant sect that had its origins way back in the 12th century with the merchant, Peter Waldo. And, as disabled rights activists have rightly pointed out, the Nazis also murdered the disabled and mentally handicapped.

For all his loud liberatarianism, Jones is coming perilously close to promoting the kind of lies that led to the death of nearly 12 million people in the Nazi death and concentration camps. These comprised 6 million Jews, and 5 1/2 million others, rounded up, persecuted and murdered because of their political or religious beliefs, or, as in the Roma, for their race. The Nazis also despised as untermenschen the Slavonic people of eastern Europe. Russian POWs were also worked to death and murdered in the camps as slave labourers.

I dare say this genuinely horrifies Jones. But as I said, he’s coming very, very close to promoting the same ideas and attitudes that created the Third Reich and its horrors.

It’s time the plug was pulled on his programme, and it was taken off the air.