Monday, November 17, 2014
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Europe - The theft of democracy - Pat Condell
If you only watch one thing about the forthcoming EU election, watch this.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Blurred Lines: The Same Old Battle Of The Sexes (in which only one side turns up)
Germaine Greer has claimed that women are worse off than ever because of the proliferation of online pornography and the torrent of abuse they have to endure on social media such as Twitter.
The Australian academic delivers her damning verdict in a BBC TV documentary - Blurred Lines: The New Battle Of The Sexes - which looks at the threats of rape and violence directed towards women online as well as the ‘objectification’ of women in violent computer games and sexually explicit pop videos.
Greer, 75, tells presenter Kirsty Wark: ‘Things have got a lot worse for women since I wrote The Female Eunuch.’ Reference
So far from being a radical new discourse on sexual politics as the name suggests, this latest effort from the same old cabal of BBC feminists promises to be a re-hashing of the same old issues and the same old whinging. Of course, the fact that I feel this way makes me a misogynist, no doubt.
It would be better entitled "What old-school feminists dislike about the internet", as it is a talking-head show in which geriatric feminists sit around moaning about the fact that people use the internet to post things they disapprove of.
It is difficult to know where to start in answering Greer's charges, as they are wrong on so many levels, and so many ideas occur at once.
Firstly, her claim that women are worse off now than ever before is ludicrous. Women - let's face it, we're talking about Western, middle-class women here - have never had it so good. They are the most privileged creatures ever to walk the face of the earth. They have record life-expectancy, their health is better than ever and they live longer than men. They are better educated than before, with more women than men graduating from college. They live in a time of political and military stability, and suffer a very low risk of violence. They have more life opportunities than anyone else in history. They can choose whether to have children or not, how many to have, and when to have them; they can choose the degree of the father's involvement with the children, while milking the father and the government for money; they can choose whether or not to work outside the home, part-time, full-time or not at all, all the while living off the government and a succession of men. Men do not enjoy those opportunities. For men, the only option in life is to work or face complete social exclusion.
The thing which really springs to mind is the lack of coverage of men's issues on a show which calls itself 'The New Battle of the Sexes'. Since the golden age of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, the men's movement has been doing all the running in terms of analysis and cultural criticism. Fresh perspectives on feminism and sexual politics have been offered by everyone from pioneers like Neil Lyndon and Warren Farrell in the early days, by numerous dissident feminists such as Erin Pizzey, Christina Hoff Sommers and Daphne Patai, up to the present-day, highly active blogosphere featuring such notables as Angry Harry, and the on-off protest movements of people like F4J. None of these developments appear to have entered into the thinking of the BBC feminists.
There is nothing about the forcible separation of men from their children following their involuntary divorce from an unfaithful woman, and the ensuing years of financial slavery and penury. There is nothing about domestic violence and child abuse committed by women. There is nothing about false accusations of rape landing innocent men in prison. There is nothing about false accusations of child abuse and domestic violence being used as weapons in the divorce courts in order to secure a better settlement for a vindictive woman, as the behest of bent lawyers and officials. Once Greer and Wark start to cover some of these issues I will take them a lot more seriously.
I am also interested to note that Greer appears to be railing against pornography, when she herself appeared in a pornographic magazine in her youth, and for a time was editor of the sex magazine 'Suck'. Pornography seems to be all right as long as Germaine Greer is doing it.
As for online insults, I have had to suffer these myself on this blog, especially from feminists, but no-one has offered me a TV show to whinge about it. Such abusive behaviour is largely a product of the general coarsening of British society which has taken place since 1945, mostly as a result of the political Left, and its catastrophic anti-education, anti-family, anti-patriotic policies of Welfare dependency, denial of responsibility and militant selfishness. In other words, Greer's generation of 1968 cool kids, with its contempt for established social values, is largely responsible for the very problem that Greer is now complaining about.
The thing which Greer and friends may not realise is that the internet is just another public place, but with the added quality that people can remain anonymous or hide behind false identities. This gives people the opportunity to be rude if they wish to. But here is an even more important point to grasp. The government cannot protect you against bad social interactions, and nor should it try. You have to manage your own social interactions. I wonder if Greer and friends will be advocating government censorship of the internet as a solution to the problem. It would be consistent with the rest of her Communist-era political outlook.
So in short, far from being a New Battle of the Sexes, the latest BBC effort promises to be the same old tired left-wing rubbish, re-heated for a gullible new audience.
The Australian academic delivers her damning verdict in a BBC TV documentary - Blurred Lines: The New Battle Of The Sexes - which looks at the threats of rape and violence directed towards women online as well as the ‘objectification’ of women in violent computer games and sexually explicit pop videos.
Greer, 75, tells presenter Kirsty Wark: ‘Things have got a lot worse for women since I wrote The Female Eunuch.’ Reference
So far from being a radical new discourse on sexual politics as the name suggests, this latest effort from the same old cabal of BBC feminists promises to be a re-hashing of the same old issues and the same old whinging. Of course, the fact that I feel this way makes me a misogynist, no doubt.
It would be better entitled "What old-school feminists dislike about the internet", as it is a talking-head show in which geriatric feminists sit around moaning about the fact that people use the internet to post things they disapprove of.
It is difficult to know where to start in answering Greer's charges, as they are wrong on so many levels, and so many ideas occur at once.
Firstly, her claim that women are worse off now than ever before is ludicrous. Women - let's face it, we're talking about Western, middle-class women here - have never had it so good. They are the most privileged creatures ever to walk the face of the earth. They have record life-expectancy, their health is better than ever and they live longer than men. They are better educated than before, with more women than men graduating from college. They live in a time of political and military stability, and suffer a very low risk of violence. They have more life opportunities than anyone else in history. They can choose whether to have children or not, how many to have, and when to have them; they can choose the degree of the father's involvement with the children, while milking the father and the government for money; they can choose whether or not to work outside the home, part-time, full-time or not at all, all the while living off the government and a succession of men. Men do not enjoy those opportunities. For men, the only option in life is to work or face complete social exclusion.
The thing which really springs to mind is the lack of coverage of men's issues on a show which calls itself 'The New Battle of the Sexes'. Since the golden age of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, the men's movement has been doing all the running in terms of analysis and cultural criticism. Fresh perspectives on feminism and sexual politics have been offered by everyone from pioneers like Neil Lyndon and Warren Farrell in the early days, by numerous dissident feminists such as Erin Pizzey, Christina Hoff Sommers and Daphne Patai, up to the present-day, highly active blogosphere featuring such notables as Angry Harry, and the on-off protest movements of people like F4J. None of these developments appear to have entered into the thinking of the BBC feminists.
There is nothing about the forcible separation of men from their children following their involuntary divorce from an unfaithful woman, and the ensuing years of financial slavery and penury. There is nothing about domestic violence and child abuse committed by women. There is nothing about false accusations of rape landing innocent men in prison. There is nothing about false accusations of child abuse and domestic violence being used as weapons in the divorce courts in order to secure a better settlement for a vindictive woman, as the behest of bent lawyers and officials. Once Greer and Wark start to cover some of these issues I will take them a lot more seriously.
I am also interested to note that Greer appears to be railing against pornography, when she herself appeared in a pornographic magazine in her youth, and for a time was editor of the sex magazine 'Suck'. Pornography seems to be all right as long as Germaine Greer is doing it.
As for online insults, I have had to suffer these myself on this blog, especially from feminists, but no-one has offered me a TV show to whinge about it. Such abusive behaviour is largely a product of the general coarsening of British society which has taken place since 1945, mostly as a result of the political Left, and its catastrophic anti-education, anti-family, anti-patriotic policies of Welfare dependency, denial of responsibility and militant selfishness. In other words, Greer's generation of 1968 cool kids, with its contempt for established social values, is largely responsible for the very problem that Greer is now complaining about.
The thing which Greer and friends may not realise is that the internet is just another public place, but with the added quality that people can remain anonymous or hide behind false identities. This gives people the opportunity to be rude if they wish to. But here is an even more important point to grasp. The government cannot protect you against bad social interactions, and nor should it try. You have to manage your own social interactions. I wonder if Greer and friends will be advocating government censorship of the internet as a solution to the problem. It would be consistent with the rest of her Communist-era political outlook.
So in short, far from being a New Battle of the Sexes, the latest BBC effort promises to be the same old tired left-wing rubbish, re-heated for a gullible new audience.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Harriet Harman Advocated Legalising Paedophilia in 1970s.
Jimmy Savile: Labour faces embarrassment over former child sex claims
Harriet Harman, the Opposition deputy leader, said the allegations that the late TV and radio presenter abused dozens of young boys and girls had “cast a stain” on the BBC and other trusted institutions.
But at the time Savile was at the height of his fame, Miss Harman was calling for the relaxation of the law on child pornography.
She was a leading light in the pressure group now known as Liberty, which advocated the lowering of the age of consent to 14.
The organisation, then run by the Health Secretary under Tony Blair, Patricia Hewitt, even counted among its affiliates a number of extreme pro-paedophilia groups whose leaders were later jailed.
It means that any independent public inquiry into the culture that allowed Savile to abuse children for so long with impunity, could end up looking into the radical left-wing demands for the liberalisation of child sex laws that were made in the 1970s.
Tim Loughton, the former children’s minister, said “It is rather eyebrow-raising to see Harriet Harman’s newfound zeal for clamping down on sexual exploitation of children, given that she was decidedly dodgy on the subject when she was part of an organisation calling for the relaxation of these laws.
“What we are seeing now is the result of a culture of complacency which has allowed celebrities and others to cover up their crimes, and Harriet Harman must share some of the blame for not taking these matters much more seriously.”
As The Daily Telegraph first disclosed in 2009, in the 1970s the extreme end of the sexual liberation movement included groups who openly campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent. The Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation affiliated themselves to the National Council for Civil Liberties, now known as Liberty.
See also:
How Hattie’s friends defended paedophilia
Harriet Harman is calling for an independent inquiry into the Jimmy Savile scandal. A key question, she says, is why so many alleged victims felt “they couldn’t complain”.
Well, one answer is that attitudes towards paedophilia in the 1970s were bizarrely relaxed – and not just in Catholic presbyteries or BBC dressing rooms. This was the era when activists on the radical Left lobbied long and hard for changes in the law to reflect a more “enlightened” attitude towards sex between adults and minors.
In 1977, months before the future deputy leader of the Labour Party took up her post, the NCCL was quoted in the Evening Standard on the subject of the infamous Paedophile Information Exchange, the “information” in question being disgusting pictures of children involved in sex acts which members would pass to each other in plain envelopes. “NCCL has no policy on [the Paedophile Information Exchange’s] aims – other than the evidence that children are harmed if, after a mutual relationship with an adult, they are exposed to the attentions of the police, press and court,” said a spokesman.
In April 1978, the NCCL published a briefing paper on the Protection of Children Bill that was before Parliament. The author – one Harriet Harman – was worried that the draft Bill placed the onus on adults caught with film or photographs of nude children to show that they were possessed with a view to “scientific or learned study”. “Our amendment places the onus of proof on the prosecution to show that the child was actually harmed,” she wrote.
Ms Harman maintains that she always opposed child pornography, and is not on record defending belief in “harmless” paedophilia, though it was held by her employers while she worked there. But no such excuse can be made for Patricia Hewitt, who was general secretary of the NCCL from 1974 to 1983 – i.e., during the period when it issued the notorious 1976 submission.
As if that was not weird enough, let's put it into context. In her IPCC report 'The Family Way (1990) Harman stated '"it cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social cohesion". In May 2008 an interview she gave to think tank Civitas Harman stated that there was "no ideal type of household in which to bring up children' Reference
So, to sum up Harman's thinking, then: children's natural fathers are a harmful and malign influence, but paedophiles are a harmless and benign one.
Just in case you've forgotten, this person is the deputy leader of the Labour Party.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Naomi Wolf on Assange
Something Rotten in the State of Sweden: 8 Big Problems with the “Case” Against Assange by Naomi Wolf
Based on my 23 years of reporting on global rape law, and my five years of supporting women at rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters, I can say with certainty that this case is not being treated as a normal rape or sexual assault case. New details from the Swedish police make this quite clear. Their transcript of the complaints against Assange is strikingly unlike the dozens of such transcripts that I have read throughout the years as an advocate for victims of sex crimes.
Specifically, there are eight ways in which this transcript is unusual:
Enlightening article by Naomi Wolf.
Based on my 23 years of reporting on global rape law, and my five years of supporting women at rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters, I can say with certainty that this case is not being treated as a normal rape or sexual assault case. New details from the Swedish police make this quite clear. Their transcript of the complaints against Assange is strikingly unlike the dozens of such transcripts that I have read throughout the years as an advocate for victims of sex crimes.
Specifically, there are eight ways in which this transcript is unusual:
Enlightening article by Naomi Wolf.
Tuesday, June 05, 2012
Doctor, 73, 'kicked out of bookstore for being alone in children's section'
Barnes & Noble has apologised to a 73-year-old man who was kicked out of one of its stores for browsing the children's section on his own.
Dr. Omar Amin, from Scottsdale, Arizona, said he was asked to leave after a female shopper told a worker she felt uneasy about his presence.
But the man, who is a world-renowned researcher of infectious diseases, said he was buying books for his two grandchildren.
'This is an insult to all men not just to me,' Amin told Azfamily.com.
'I left the store. I was upset like hell because I've been so insulted and humiliated in public for the charge of being a man.'
Read more
Dr. Omar Amin, from Scottsdale, Arizona, said he was asked to leave after a female shopper told a worker she felt uneasy about his presence.
But the man, who is a world-renowned researcher of infectious diseases, said he was buying books for his two grandchildren.
'This is an insult to all men not just to me,' Amin told Azfamily.com.
'I left the store. I was upset like hell because I've been so insulted and humiliated in public for the charge of being a man.'
Read more
Sunday, February 05, 2012
‘Captain Coward’: Behold our brave new sexually emancipated world
Story here
The disaster has the fingerprints of our poisoned and dying western culture all over it.
What kind of man sneaks away under cover of darkness from his own sinking ship, leaving nearly 4200 passengers and crew to fend for themselves? What kind of men knock aside old ladies, little girls and young mothers to get to lifeboats first? Why, modern men, sexually emancipated men who have been raised on the tenets of feminism and our “contemporary” mores.
What can an expression like “women and children first” mean to modern men who have been taught all their lives that women are nothing more precious than sexual playthings, and children nothing more than a disposable burden?
Voris mentioned the type of men who are approved by the feminist-controlled media: weak, stupid and ineffectual, who need to be ruled over by strong, hip, intelligent women...the flip side of feminism’s misandry [is] its vilification and demonisation of masculine strength. According to the tenets of the ideology, strong men are violent, evil and terrifying. Instead of heroes protecting women and children, feminism depicts strong men as brutal monsters, wife-beaters and child abusers.
The Costa Concordia disaster brought into the limelight the effects on men of feminism, and her strumpet daughter, the Sexual Revolution. Feminism has killed the cultural priority of men protecting and being responsible for women. In one video, Michael Voris spoke of the “hero’s journey,” the traditional western cultural archetype of the boy who leaves home, faces and overcomes adversity and becomes a man capable of protecting a family. But our feminist-inspired anti-culture, coupled with a soul-deadening consumerist materialism, has tossed these concepts out.
By telling women they don’t need men, by demonizing the value of masculinity, feminism has at the same time told men that they never need to grow up. If feminism has told women they can sleep around “like men,” it must be remembered that this implies that men may do the same right back. Instead of insisting that men grow up, marry a woman and protect and care for their children, it has offered men women as toys while offering women the Pill, abortion and family court as the back-up plan. Feminism defines “equality” as men and women competing equally in the labour market and using each other equally as objects.
Feminism, because it is essentially dishonest, childish and self-serving, will never own up to the logical conclusions of its premises.
“The average Italian man is said to be narcissist, egomaniac, coward, selfish, unable to follow basic procedures and unable to follow the rules. True or not, it’s a stereotype, a stereotype which is strongly proved by the latest, tragic events in Italy.”
While Italians vent their fury on Francesco Schettino for being everything they hate about themselves, it must be remembered that many countries were represented in the crew roster of the Costa Concordia. The disaster has the fingerprints of our poisoned and dying western culture all over it.
Reading the reports of the Costa Concordia, I could not help but recognize the results of our society’s new priorities. Many observers made the comparison with the Titanic disaster. One hundred years ago, 1st class men lifted steerage class women and children into lifeboats in the full knowledge that they were giving their lives. The captain of that ship was last reported seen holding a child in his arms seeking a way to save her. A hundred years later, we have a coast guard officer shouting at “Captain Coward” to “Vada a bordo, cazzo!” … Get on board, damn it!
Behold our brave new sexually emancipated world.
The disaster has the fingerprints of our poisoned and dying western culture all over it.
What kind of man sneaks away under cover of darkness from his own sinking ship, leaving nearly 4200 passengers and crew to fend for themselves? What kind of men knock aside old ladies, little girls and young mothers to get to lifeboats first? Why, modern men, sexually emancipated men who have been raised on the tenets of feminism and our “contemporary” mores.
What can an expression like “women and children first” mean to modern men who have been taught all their lives that women are nothing more precious than sexual playthings, and children nothing more than a disposable burden?
Voris mentioned the type of men who are approved by the feminist-controlled media: weak, stupid and ineffectual, who need to be ruled over by strong, hip, intelligent women...the flip side of feminism’s misandry [is] its vilification and demonisation of masculine strength. According to the tenets of the ideology, strong men are violent, evil and terrifying. Instead of heroes protecting women and children, feminism depicts strong men as brutal monsters, wife-beaters and child abusers.
The Costa Concordia disaster brought into the limelight the effects on men of feminism, and her strumpet daughter, the Sexual Revolution. Feminism has killed the cultural priority of men protecting and being responsible for women. In one video, Michael Voris spoke of the “hero’s journey,” the traditional western cultural archetype of the boy who leaves home, faces and overcomes adversity and becomes a man capable of protecting a family. But our feminist-inspired anti-culture, coupled with a soul-deadening consumerist materialism, has tossed these concepts out.
By telling women they don’t need men, by demonizing the value of masculinity, feminism has at the same time told men that they never need to grow up. If feminism has told women they can sleep around “like men,” it must be remembered that this implies that men may do the same right back. Instead of insisting that men grow up, marry a woman and protect and care for their children, it has offered men women as toys while offering women the Pill, abortion and family court as the back-up plan. Feminism defines “equality” as men and women competing equally in the labour market and using each other equally as objects.
Feminism, because it is essentially dishonest, childish and self-serving, will never own up to the logical conclusions of its premises.
“The average Italian man is said to be narcissist, egomaniac, coward, selfish, unable to follow basic procedures and unable to follow the rules. True or not, it’s a stereotype, a stereotype which is strongly proved by the latest, tragic events in Italy.”
While Italians vent their fury on Francesco Schettino for being everything they hate about themselves, it must be remembered that many countries were represented in the crew roster of the Costa Concordia. The disaster has the fingerprints of our poisoned and dying western culture all over it.
Reading the reports of the Costa Concordia, I could not help but recognize the results of our society’s new priorities. Many observers made the comparison with the Titanic disaster. One hundred years ago, 1st class men lifted steerage class women and children into lifeboats in the full knowledge that they were giving their lives. The captain of that ship was last reported seen holding a child in his arms seeking a way to save her. A hundred years later, we have a coast guard officer shouting at “Captain Coward” to “Vada a bordo, cazzo!” … Get on board, damn it!
Behold our brave new sexually emancipated world.
Why has no-one heard of Britain's first serial killer, Mary Ann Cotton?
Story here
"Two decades before Jack the Ripper would terrorise the streets of Whitechapel in London, Mary Ann Cotton had already become a killing machine, perhaps murdering as many as eight of her own children, seven stepchildren, her mother, three husbands, a lover – and an inconvenient friend.
Even crime aficionados, those familiar with such names as Shipman, Nilsen, Sutcliffe and West, know little or nothing of her. She has been largely erased from history and remains today only a half-remembered local curiosity even in her native North East.
Her choice of poison was arsenic, favoured by murderers down the centuries for largely pragmatic reasons. First, it dissolves in a hot liquid, a cup of tea, for example, so is easy to administer. Second, it was readily available. Although by this stage, the authorities had started regulating the sale of arsenic, a high concentration could still be obtained in a substance known as ‘soft soap’, a household disinfectant.
There was a third reason, too: as Mary Ann well knew, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were vomiting, diarrhoea and dehydration. A busy and unsuspecting doctor was always more likely to diagnose this cluster of symptoms as gastroenteritis – especially in patients who were poor and undernourished – than to suspect murder.
According to death and burial certificates, all her victims had died of gastric ailments.
It seems she also played the role of the grieving wife and mother to perfection, making it all the more difficult to be precise about the number of people she may have killed.
It is hard not to believe that there was some element of enjoyment at the control she exercised – that she was, in other words, a psychopath. I believe she would have enjoyed holding down Nattrass as he died writhing in agony.
There is no doubt, too, that greed was a powerful motive as, husband by husband, she climbed the social ladder of a newly mobile society (in which, for the first time, ordinary people had life insurance).
Her desperate self-promotion and the terrible manner of her execution ensured a strangely sympathetic hearing in her final months and the immediate aftermath, and this has helped confuse our understanding of a woman who by any standards was a quite relentless killer. Had she not been arrested, I am confident there would have been many more victims.
What little historical analysis she has received has often been quite naive, citing her as an example of the hardships endured by women, or even suggesting that she had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice."
It seems that a woman is always and only a victim, even when she is that thing which society often fears the most - a relentless and prolific serial killer.
"Two decades before Jack the Ripper would terrorise the streets of Whitechapel in London, Mary Ann Cotton had already become a killing machine, perhaps murdering as many as eight of her own children, seven stepchildren, her mother, three husbands, a lover – and an inconvenient friend.
Even crime aficionados, those familiar with such names as Shipman, Nilsen, Sutcliffe and West, know little or nothing of her. She has been largely erased from history and remains today only a half-remembered local curiosity even in her native North East.
Her choice of poison was arsenic, favoured by murderers down the centuries for largely pragmatic reasons. First, it dissolves in a hot liquid, a cup of tea, for example, so is easy to administer. Second, it was readily available. Although by this stage, the authorities had started regulating the sale of arsenic, a high concentration could still be obtained in a substance known as ‘soft soap’, a household disinfectant.
There was a third reason, too: as Mary Ann well knew, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were vomiting, diarrhoea and dehydration. A busy and unsuspecting doctor was always more likely to diagnose this cluster of symptoms as gastroenteritis – especially in patients who were poor and undernourished – than to suspect murder.
According to death and burial certificates, all her victims had died of gastric ailments.
It seems she also played the role of the grieving wife and mother to perfection, making it all the more difficult to be precise about the number of people she may have killed.
It is hard not to believe that there was some element of enjoyment at the control she exercised – that she was, in other words, a psychopath. I believe she would have enjoyed holding down Nattrass as he died writhing in agony.
There is no doubt, too, that greed was a powerful motive as, husband by husband, she climbed the social ladder of a newly mobile society (in which, for the first time, ordinary people had life insurance).
Her desperate self-promotion and the terrible manner of her execution ensured a strangely sympathetic hearing in her final months and the immediate aftermath, and this has helped confuse our understanding of a woman who by any standards was a quite relentless killer. Had she not been arrested, I am confident there would have been many more victims.
What little historical analysis she has received has often been quite naive, citing her as an example of the hardships endured by women, or even suggesting that she had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice."
It seems that a woman is always and only a victim, even when she is that thing which society often fears the most - a relentless and prolific serial killer.
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