Goldsmiths LGBT society says feminists should be sent to a gulag.

Seriously - education is fucking expensive. People are going to notice

Speaking of which. Is the OU still free of this stuff ? It's Sports Science, so I guess there is room for the TRA to feature. This is the only compromise DS and I could come to over me wanting him to go to England/Wales for HE and him point blank refusing to go and live somewhere that doesn't make a big deal out of his sport.

Before I send money....is it likely DS be left exposed to social/academic sanction cos there is no possibility he will bend over the fairness of sex segregation in sport. Nor will he manage (or find much interest in trying) all the pronouns frenzy. It's even harder for bilingual/ESL people to manage the minefield of pronouns than it is for native speakers.

I just assumed the OU would be far less political than most, being online and having an older cohort. Does that sound about right ?

And that is a bloody frightening prospect.

Too right it is. We are moving towards a position where there are only two choices: firstly, an ultra-authoritarian left that punishes people for wrong think and actually isn't really joking about shunning and gulags; secondly, a far right that will take out all the gains we (women, gays and lesbians, black and brown people) have won with our blood and sweat.

It's very worrying.

Goldsmiths seem to breed these people. What sort of an environment exists to make these people feel safe making such assertions? Are they untouchable for some reason?

This is from 3 years ago.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/bahar-mustafa-charged-with-sending-malicious-message-after-tweeting-kill-all-white-men-a6683241.html

They don't feel able to vote for Labour, the Green Party's screwed and the Liberals are a no go.

It's a pretty scary situation when the hard right look (and I stress, look - reality is very different) less anti-Semitic and more supportive of women than the left.

Yes, the right are opportunistic swine: they're only pretending to opposed to anti-Semitism and that for the entirely cynical reason that it's a stick to beat both the left and Muslim organisations. Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for their purported support for women: it's cynical posturing, because they don't mind chucking the ladies a few bones if it's an opportunity to attack people they hate more.

But their messaging is clear, and the reaction of most of the general public to the likes of Challoner is "these people are weird AF, how could anyone possibly vote for them?"

As you say: it's very scary. But the Labour Party today looks increasingly like a weird collection of crazy people, with their own language, ideas and values which are entirely alien a lot of the voting public.

Seriously - education is fucking expensive. People are going to notice.

I am involved in hiring decisions. From now on, if I am sifting CVs and I see a recent (say last five or so years) Goldsmiths degree on one, it is going in the bin. If I am on an interview panel and a candidate is a recent Goldsmiths graduate, I will do everything I can to veto their selection. I need the people I work with to be pragmatic and to use evidence and facts to inform their judgements. I need the people I work with to be able to respectfully disagree with others. Goldsmiths LGBTQ[whatever other letters there were] have proved that their
students cannot cope with these basic standards of evidence-based reasoning and decent human interaction.

No mention of feminists as far as I can see, but I believe it is part the the same twitter thread, same poster.

Made it to the Daily Mail

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6154777/Goldsmiths-student-group-mounts-extraordinary-defence-notorious-GULAG-worker-camps.html

This is the thing that terrifies me too - that the far right will get a foothold. I'm already seeing rumblings of this in certain groups. They don't feel able to vote for Labour, the Green Party's screwed and the Liberals are a no go.

the only counter-narrative will come from the Right.

^www.teaparty.org/gay-rights-group-british-university-wants-put-people-gulags-323570/^

[sigh] Dear Tea Party, this is a trans rights group. I doubt that LGB people even get a look in.

Pedantry aside, the conflation of trans with LGB people and feminists means that the backlash to this TRA insanity is going to take out so much civil rights progress for women and same-sex-attracted people. But if we do nothing, we lose civil rights anyway because of the ladydicks in women's spaces and lesbians' knickers.

These same girls went to all of my lecturers to demand I be prevent from speaking as it violated their safe space.

Point of order: they are women. As the adult women they are, they should know that you don't get to turn up to someone else's meeting and then complain about "your safe space" being violated. They could simply choose not to attend the meeting. I despair, because the original point of "safe spaces" was to have a place where 1) discrimination and harassment was not OK, 2) difficult topics were discussed by prior arrangement with notice so that people could psychologically prepare or make an informed choice to leave. It wasn't ever supposed to be about stopping people from saying something you didn't like, but to make sure that you weren't caught off-guard by material that would have you flashing-back to your rape. And it certainly wasn't supposed to be a tool to harass people with different opinions from you, which it sounds like these adult women who should know better have been using it for.

the only counter-narrative will come from the Right.

www.teaparty.org/gay-rights-group-british-university-wants-put-people-gulags-323570/

So what I’m getting from this thread is that with Natasha Kennedy and their merry band on the case, the education department has moved into re-education?

Terrifying.

I've said this before, about the Green Party/Challoner incident.

The Left need to get a handle on this . A narrative that gets to grip with the nihilism, social closure, extremism and abuse involved in these bizarre positions.

If they don't, the only counter-narrative will come from the Right.

And that is a bloody frightening prospect.

Because people are beginning to notice.

Seriously - education is fucking expensive. People are going to notice.

And you don't want the only 'explanation' and narrative saying: 'Whoah! There's a problem here,' coming from the Right.

You really, really don't.

And I know feminists (well, some feminists) are trying to do this - provide a counter-narrative, based on progressive principles - but, damn, we could use some fucking back up from the Left.

This is a quote from an ex lecturer at Goldsmiths regarding the Gulag comments.

"I started the Liberal Society at Goldsmiths after realising there were far more people right of centre than I previously thought. I had never known some people in my classes believed in the same things
These people had never mentioned what they believed in before out of fear of social rejection.

With around 50 actual members signed up we started organising events. I found this to be extremely difficult as the you have to essentially proof your speaker will not offend people. This is at the discretion of the university who can reject anyone they want

I hosted an event with @bswud from @ASI at the time on bias in the labour market. This event was attended by our 30 lib members and 7 people from the Palestinian soc and feminist soc who branded the talk, our members and the speaker racist due to comments made by AS in 1700's.

After the talk they heckled my members at the pub (which I had to host it at because we couldn't get a university room) and said that I was a Nazi, calling me out on social media. These same girls went to all of my lecturers to demand I be prevent from speaking as it violated their safe space. Luckily I was surprised to be defended by some fantastic lecturers who were defenders of free speech. They pointed out that I merely held liberal values.

My society slowly died as young first years students, understandably, did not like being called Nazis and racists. For clarification, the society had people of all backgrounds, genders, faiths and ethnicity.

The news today is symptomatic the Goldsmiths SU being run by self declared communists for over 4 years. It's sad but also not limited to Goldsmiths. Its all across the UoL.

In sum, Goldsmiths students are rotten to the core. The student body is fashionably extremist and few have any real conviction in their beliefs. This is why I was not shocked by the news today. This is a genuine reflection of the opinions held by the wider student body"

I looked up the named ‘social media officer’ in the published meeting minutes on Facebook last night.

It was a young, black male undergrad (presumably starting their second year). I decided not to share his personal info for informal safeguarding reasons - technically he’s an adult but my own son is only a year younger and he’s definitely not a proper grown up, in my eyes, yet!

Is G/S SU affiliated with NUS? Because you know who was out meeting/training LGBT societies last year, don’t you?

Jess Bradley.

Honestly, it's too important to be stolen.

'Safeguarding' is the series of practices, with reference to law emerging from institutional reports into various significant institutional failings - eg. The Victoria Climibie case - intended to avoid the repetition of those failings.

They are a significant institutional recognition of the vulnerability of certain groups (eg children) and the way they can be failed both by individuals and institutions, and an attempt to establish practice to mitigate those potential failures.

Safeguarding is grounded in actual, real failures and the actusl, real fact of the vulnerability of certain groups of people.

It is really, really important. It is a massive legal and institutional acknowledgment of the real danger of actual abusive power relations to real individuals and groups.

It is too important to have it stolen and misappropriated to cover for abusive, or potentially abusive, practices and individuals.

I agree.

Their safe space was getting violated by facts n shit.

Red

I see that as a very cynical attempt to change the meaning of 'safeguarding' whilst simultaneously emptying it of the power, meaning and force it has to 'speak' about the experience of the most marginalised and at risk.

The technique is the same one as you see with the more powerful aspects of 'post modernism' (though I think I hate having all those post-68 movements lumped together - I think that's part of the problem).

It's theft - appropriation of the conceptual and linguistic tools of those struggling against abuse of power, by power, and then displacement to another area - until those tools-of-those-resisting become a tool of those hammering down on those resisting.

It's no accident they're trying to empty 'safeguarding' of any meaning.

They've seen women here and on Twitter using the term "safeguarding" and have no idea what it means, but think it's probably a good way to prevent anyone from asking inconvenient questions.

The account had been locked due to 'safeguarding'?

'Due to safeguarding' is euphemism for 'avoiding reality'.

They could use a combination of austerity and this pomo bullshit. Its difficult to fight when there is no identifiable enemy, and your weapons are facts and common sense.

I am much more pessimistic but hoping that I'm very wrong in sharing some of Applebaum's views on Washington but in a UK context. Since the collapse of 2008 and what happened after, my sense of being virtually occupied by an oligarchy is strengthening.

𝗪𝗮𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗰𝗰𝘂𝗽𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆
The mechanisms meant to protect the state from an incompetent or dictatorial president are not being used because people in power no longer believe in them, or are afraid to use them. Washington feels like the capital of a state where the legal order has collapsed because, in some ways, it is.

We saw the slurs being cast at FPFW, WPUK etc. with support from the news organisations who repeat that nonsense, or have high-ranking officers who make those slurs (Sue Pascoe). We see TELI - a bunch of people with lawyers, making those slurs with a sense of impunity.

All of the recent events. We see them. And still where are many people on this?
-----

Do you think we get caviar with our 140g of black bread?

I hope so, dahlink, as who eats carbs? We have to get our protein where we can. Who knows what the provenance of the caviar will be tho' - and I'm unsure if we'll be granted lemons.

I think that's one of the things I find so worrying about all this, Errol.

In the sense you outline, 'decolonising science' has a strong and important lineage. I remember the grass-roots women's movements to centre women's health and knowledge of our bodies. It was painfully obvious that health science and medicine had a male bias, with women's health under-resources, under-researched and lacking in prestige.

Changing that (in so much as it has changed) required a lot of pressure, by a lot of women, over decades.

There is something so dangerous and even cynical about appropriating the knowledge gained from that struggle (praxis) - that knowledge is not a non-political artefact, that it is embodied, expresses political and power biases, that it is not just knowledge as 'nous' but also practices and institutions - and putting it to service the already privileged, to unvoice and disempower the marginalised.

I don't dismiss post-modernism. It's a huge field. It has many tendencies. We do it a massive disservice if we forget that a lot of 'post-modern' thought arose as a description of what groups excluded from mainstream politics were already doing. (There's a whole other story about expropriation and re-writing history there.)

But there is something wildly awry about strategies that began as a crtique of power turning into a thoroughgoing nihilism as regards truth.

And I think it is not an accident that the ultimate effect is to silence further those who are most powerless (eg. Female prisoners).

The account had been locked due to 'safeguarding'?

They had fun, fun, fun 'til teacher took the Twitter away.

The account had been locked due to 'safeguarding'?

I have noticed this recently that TRAs are using words and phrases like 'safeguarding' and 'due dilligence' and similar but not quite in the correct context. I think it's all part of trying to appropriate the language used by GC feminists in their arguments, to make them sound like their arguments are equally as robust, but they just can't quite get it right. Bless them.