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

thanks namechanged very useful.

I do think Goldsmiths is in a league of its own, though, where staff are very much part of the problem, not only the students.

You want to be a three-legged lecturer at UCL

You would settle for a two-legged three year contract at KCL.

You are a post-doc at Goldsmiths.

PoMo has made truth impossible. I used to say that PoMo decays, like a chemical reaction, to neoliberalism, because of its primacy of the subjective. But I think it's gone beyond that into the very thing it came about in reaction to: totalitarianism.

This.

One thing we can be sure of: pomo rots the brain.

Has any one got any advice for GC parents on HE places which have the same problems as Goldsmiths?

That partly depends on the course. If it's something like sociology, I would be worried about a lot of places. Also on whether the applicant wants to be involved in SU politics (again, lots of places will have issues if you're GC). There's a website called Spiked which ranks universities according to whether they limit freedom of speech. A lot of the top universities are identified as having problems in this area. I do think Goldsmiths is in a league of its own, though, where staff are very much part of the problem, not only the students.

I would strongly discourage any child I care about from going there
Has any one got any advice for GC parents on HE places which have the same problems as Goldsmiths?

And the war on intellectuals
Death of Stalin film too, when the doctors have been gulagged; there's no doctors to treat dying Stalin. And Khmer Rouge Cambodia: children had to report on their parents, which seems to be another principle of this cult. That was a youth cult too.

Bertrand, a friend's son went to Goldsmith's and is very embarrassed to admit it. He says 'London' if asked where he studied and if pushed he will qualify with 'but it was different then'. I would strongly discourage any child I care about from going there.

Thank you ladies and gents (no assumptions of gender) for a brilliant morning read.

Funny funny. What daft kids. WE WILL RE-EDUCATE YOU IN GULAG. YOU VAGINA OWNERS.

And the war on intellectuals - whether scientists, doctors, historians, economists - was a full on war in the old Soviet Union (and to an even greater degree in Mao's China) because there is nothing repressive authoritarians hate more than someone who refuses to say 2+2=5 just because the regime says so (one of my favourite memes on the now-deleted thread was the one of the BB style eye on a red ground, with the slogan "How many penises am I holding up, Winston?")

Also the old Soviet era joke - why do KGB men go round in threes? One can read, one can write, and the other one is there to keep an eye on the two intellectuals. (And let us not forget that Putin was a very high ranking KGB officer prior to the fall of Communism.)

Is it really, really, not a spoof account? It sounds like a complete wind up, the jolly holiday camp descriptions of book clubs and theatre performances. (intellectuals keeping their brains going against all the odds notwithstanding)

Is it only communist 'gulags' which are being liberated into their true light, or do we await the truth about Robben Island?

Oh my giddy aunt, I honestly thought that account was a parody

I think we need to stop characterising parts of this movement as silly, and start taking them deadly seriously. These people aren't kidding: they see value in enforced thought, mandatory obedience, the usefulness of lies. Civilisation doesn't naturally always get more progressive, but that's what this type of person wants you to believe, when actually they're pushing for the opposite.

This is exactly what Timothy Snyder highlights in "On Tyranny", which looks at the behaviours that are necessary to enable a totalitarian society to flourish.

He talks about the danger of "heedless conformity" and "anticipatory obedience" in enabling people to rob you of your power. We have to resist. He says the truth dies in four modes - the first three can be seen in action anywhere within transactivism. The fourth isn't fully formed yet (or is it?).

1. open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts (such as the anger with which the statements "women don't have penisis" or "lesbians are female homosexuals" are greeted. Or the fervour with which the lie of razors behind stickers raced round the world. Believing clitorises are short penises. Males have ladybrains. I could go on for a long time on this one).

1. shamanistic incantation (Transwomen are women)

1. Magical thinking or the open embrace of contradiction (humans can change sex; transwomen are the same as women, but women can't be transwomen. Again, many many examples of this)

1. Misplaced faith. I think this is still forming, but the whole genderist position is a faith-based one- what is a gender identity but a soul by another name?

I'm sorry to suck the fun out of the thread, laughing at complete dolts is generally something I am right up for - but this genuinely worries me

So universities in Britain are releasing young people into the Wild who are convinced in their conviction that people should be tortured and die due to their opinons on a topic.

How is that okay?

I don’t remember the gay rights movement suggesting all homophobes should be rounded up and tortured, more that if correct education was given, the amount of homophobia would be less.

Where has this insidious idea that those who don’t believe differently to you should be murdered? Who is suggesting these ideas of prisons without crimes?

Wtf

My son is starting there this week. He's doing music.
But... He's a huge proponent of free speech. He's likely to be one of the ones they'll come after. At least I'll see all my family in the gulag. More than I see him now.

I guess there's a silver lining

I agree Fermats, the tweets were in the realm of holocaust deniers. It was wilful and deliberate.

Dr Harrop actually retweeted their 'de-essentialise science' comment, although it now appears to have been deleted. Starting to think he's the parody account.

This explains a great deal to me. I believe Dr H is a Uni of Manchester graduate, I work with a lot of people who graduated from the same course as him and they are very much of the same view. They are very, very difficult to work with and their constant interruptions to processes, discussions and procedures make life very difficult for staff and patients.

Some one upthread posed the question (I paraphrase wildly) "are they really that badly-read, or is there something more sinister going on?" The answer is "more sinister"; the give-away in the original tweets (again, paraphrasing wildly, but staying true to the meaning) was where they said something about anyone who didn't get their history from biased capitalist sources would agree with them and linked to what I assume was the equivalent of David Irving, only for Stalin and the Gulags.

So in other words, they aren't ignorant, they do know about the work of Applebaum and Solzhenitsyn, they just write them off as capitalist propaganda. That's not ignorance, that's something far, far scarier. To know facts and wilfully deny them in the service of your political ideology - we're into full-on totalitarian territory here. These people know full well what a gulgag was and what was meant by re-education, and if they ever get political power, they're very much looking forward to re-instituting both in an all-too-real sense.

As for what happens to us scientists - depends on whether the regime has a use for us. Solzhenitsyn wrote about that too - The First Circle. And there's that marvellous running gag in The Death of Stalin where the Politburo are scrambling around trying to find a doctor for Stalin, who's had a stroke, only they can't because they've sent all the decent doctors to the Gulag.

(As an aside, I find those archive sites are all black listed both by my mobile provider and my net-nanny - I think because anything could be archived there and the algorithms they normally use to sort out adult content just don't work on them, so they ban the lot. But I'm glad to know someone got the lot, because the comments - pretty much 100% "WTAF? Are these people insane, stupid or both?" - were a joy to behold. And oh yes, of course Dr. Hardplop would retweet. How could he miss a chance like that?)

Mrkhtake2's take down is excellent, but I do quibble with this:

"Anyway, we seem a bit confused about the term 'death camp'. It means a prison camp for political prisoners or prisoners of war in which many die from poor conditions and treatment."

The term "death camp" is normally used for the Nazi death camps in the Holocaust. They were not prison camps where people died from poor conditions, they were places where people were literally sent to die (correct use of the word literally). A train load of 800 Jews would arrive at Treblinka in Poland, forced to undress and then herded into communal "showers", the gas would be turned on and within minutes they'd be dead. The whole process from arrival to death would take less than half an hour.

As someone just pointed out in the other thread if it's TERFs only then it will at least be a female only space.

Hah! Every cloud silver lining etc.

Dr Harrop actually retweeted their 'de-essentialise science' comment, although it now appears to have been deleted. Starting to think he's the parody account.

Can a medical degree be rescinded because later evidence shows it was awarded by mistake?

Not to worry, Bertrand, another public-spirited person on www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/9es8t3/anyone_else_peaking_at_the_goldsmiths_lgbtq/ pasted the text in.

^Here’s a mini thread to clarify what a “gulag” is, for those who only have heard it being used as a buzzword and why sending a bigot to one is actually a compassionate, non-violent course of action...

So... first of all,the USSR no longer exists, therefore "gulags" no longer exist. May as well make a case against orientalism but USSR =/= Russia. Russia is NOT governed by a communist party. Got that? Okay, good.

So... gulags. First myth to debunk: "u work until u die in gulags!!!!". The Soviets did away with life sentences and the longest sentence was 10 years. Capital punishment was reserved for the most heinous, serious crimes.

Why? The penal system was a rehabillitary one and self supporting, a far cry from the Western, capitalist notion of prison. The aim was to correct and change the ways of "criminals". If it couldn't be done in 10 years, it couldn't be done at all.

Much like wider Soviet society, everyone who was able to work did so at a wage proportionate to those who weren't incarcerated and, as they gained skills, were able to move up the ranks and work under less supervision.

Educational work was also a prominent feature of the Soviet penal system. There were regular classes, book clubs, newspaper editorial teams, sports, theatre & performance groups.

There's so much more to add but the reality is none of you actually care to learn about gulags. You don't care about what fascism actually is and how it fuelled by anti-communist, orientalist myths and lies propagated by the CIA.

Long story short, friends, the ideas of TERFs and anti trans bigots literally kill and must be eradicated through reeducation. Science must be decolonised and de-essentialised in order for this to happen.^

😲😲😲😲

This makes me sad. I went to Goldsmiths. Did more than one degree there in fact, in the 90s/early 2000s. It was a great place. Always had a social conscience, always very liberal, but the causes I was involved in weren't ridiculously discriminatory or nasty ones. Tuition fees, better access to university for the local community, better housing for students, better mental health services, these were the sorts of things we campaigned and worked on.

I'm just sad that it's going to seem embarrassing that I went there. It's not the place I knew at all.

Dr Harrop actually retweeted their 'de-essentialise science' comment, although it now appears to have been deleted. Starting to think he's the parody account.

"Found a link on Twitter. A public-spirited person archived it. archive.is/zOGDg"

Sky Briadband won't let me look at that!

"Is that a genuine question about a real kid?"
Yes it is- just thought I'd do a quick canvas among knowledgable people! The floaty-quinoa aspect appeals- the freedom of speech thing is terrifying. Anyway-as you were.