Jonathan Ross supports Glinner

I went to art school - it really looks like a jokey project. We did one on ‘alternative Olympics’.

Irvine Welsh

"In this thread someone asks critics of @suzanne_moore’s ‘offending article’ to point out any specific transphobia in it. So far nobody has been able to do this. I’ve just had a good look and I can’t find any. I don’t know if that makes me blind, insensitive or transphobic?"

twitter.com/IrvineWelsh/status/1240874631730511872

Well, one of the things I've always said is that a lot of here have managed to connect the dots because we've had a lot of time to put it together over the past few years. If lots of people find themselves with time, and access to the internet to read all of the work that women have been doing over these past few years, in the next few weeks, we may well see the flowering of a new renaissance...

Here's hoping.

An upside is that there are threads like this starting to emerge from the LGB community each time a blue tick joins the discussion. Maybe with people being at home on twitter more, there is lots of climbing happening to the summit of this issue.

A summit that once reached cannot be backtracked.

twitter.com/ProfessionalJu2/status/1240701919103864833

their complete lack of knowledge about a subject doesn't stop them from expressing a confident opinion about it

To have the confidence of a mediocre white man, eh?

Pernicious polarisation

In political science, pernicious polarisation occurs when a single political cleavage overrides other divides and commonalities to the point it has boiled into a single divide which becomes entrenched and self-reinforcing. Unlike most types of polarisation, pernicious polarisation does not need to be ideological. Rather, pernicious polarisation operates on a single political cleavage, which can be partisan identity, religious vs secular, globalist vs nationalist, urban vs rural, etc. This political divide creates an explosion of mutual group distrust which hardens between the two political parties (or coalitions) and spreads beyond the political sphere into societal relations. People begin to perceive politics as "us" vs "them."

Causes

According to Carothers & O'Donohue , pernicious polarisation is a process most often driven by a single political cleavage dominating an otherwise pluralistic political life, overriding other cleavages. On the other hand, Slater & Arugay (2019) have argued that it's not the depth of a single social cleavage, but the political elite's process for removing a leader which best explains whether or not polarisation truly becomes pernicious.

Lebas & Munemo (2019) have argued pernicious polarisation is marked by both deeper societal penetration and segregation than other forms of political polarisation, making it less amenable to resolution. It is agreed, however, that pernicious polarisation reinforces and entrenches itself, dragging the country into a downward spiral of anger and division for which there are no easy remedies.

Effect on governance

Pernicious polarisation makes compromise, consensus, interaction, and tolerance increasingly costly and tenuous for individuals and political actors on both sides of the divide. Pernicious polarisation routinely weakens respect for democratic norms, corrodes basic legislative processes, undermines the nonpartisan nature of the judiciary and fuels public disaffection with political parties It exacerbates intolerance and discrimination, diminishes societal trust, and increases violence throughout the society. In country-by-country instances of pernicious polarisation, it is common to see the winner exclude the loser from positions of power or using means to prevent the loser from becoming a threat in the future. In these situations, the loser typically questions the legitimacy of the institutions allowing the winner to create a hegemony, which causes citizens to grow cynical towards politics. In these countries, politics is often seen as a self-referential power game that has nothing to do with people.

Effect on public trust

Perniciously polarised societies often witness public controversies over factually provable questions. During this process, facts and moral truths increasingly lose their weight, as more people conform to the messages of their own bloc. Social and political actors such as journalists, academics, and politicians either become engaged in partisan storytelling or else incur growing social, political, and economic costs. Electorates lose confidence in public institutions. Support for norms and democracy decline. It becomes increasingly difficult for people to act in a morally principled fashion by appealing to the truth or acting in line with one's values when it conflicts with one's party interests Once pernicious polarisation takes hold, it takes on a life of its own, regardless of earlier intentions.

Maybe one good thing that may well come out of this corona crisis - is that the bunkers that people have constructed in order to protect their increasingly polarised & tribal identities - might start to crumble.

What I see is many still clinging to their usual positions and rhetoric - even as the whole ship goes down. An interesting quotation in The Spectator this week:

At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence ( Albert Camus ,The Plague)

Sorry, Justhadathought! Got your name wrong.

I wonder the same, JustAThought. A lot of us are finding that we have much more time than usual at the moment, so plenty of time for people like Bragg and Nandy to read blogs or watch videos from WPUK meetings. Maya Forstater wrote a blog post about how every response Lisa Nandy made to questions about GRA reform related to the trans child in her constituency - even though GRA reform is all about the legal process for adults and nothing to do with children. It clearly demonstrated that Nandy had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

The thing about WPUK is that if you read their website, or their tweets, or watch the videos of their meetings, it's immediately clear that this is a sober, responsible organisation engaged in respectful debate. There's no hate there at all.

I'd lay money on Bragg being a dead cert for the Owen Jones school of pompous spadework.

You know what I love about men like Billy Bragg? The fact that their complete lack of knowledge about a subject doesn't stop them from expressing a confident opinion about it. How nice it must be so pleased with yourself and your own rightness that you don't feel the need to educate yourself about a subject before pronouncing on it in public

Absolutely!

And how embarrassing when/if he finally wakes up......to discover the reality. I wonder if Lisa Nandy and others have actually taken any time, of late, to follow up on that which they've been making very provocative public statements about.

I wonder when/if they do whether thy'll take the Owen Jones root......of digging themselves in even further....or that of some kind of contrition.

He thinks he speaks for 'thu workin' maaaan'.

You know what I love about men like Billy Bragg? The fact that their complete lack of knowledge about a subject doesn't stop them from expressing a confident opinion about it. How nice it must be so pleased with yourself and your own rightness that you don't feel the need to educate yourself about a subject before pronouncing on it in public.

Holy shit the brass fucking neck of men magnanimously discussing our ability to discuss our own rights. You have to read up and down a bit too to get the full magnitude of the pompous masculinity on display here.

It's gobsmacking how very patriarchal they all are.

Billy Bragg appears to have no idea about what's been going on over the last few years.

twitter.com/billybragg/status/1240974506853834755

Demand and get your apology between gentlemen and back pat the fuck out of it, but when women are linked to the discussion about their own rights, it's an escalation and uncalled for.

Fucking fucking bullshit.

God, I'm hopping about this.

Glinner tagged in Linda Bellos, WPUK and Helen Steel and Bragg dismissed it as 'inviting a pile on' to poor, beleaguered, reasonable Billy and then said he had better things to do.

twitter.com/billybragg/status/1240959491732094976?s=20

Holy shit the brass fucking neck of men magnanimously discussing our ability to discuss our own rights. You have to read up and down a bit too to get the full magnitude of the pompous masculinity on display here.

Tell you what lads, how about you all fuck off and sort your own shit out. Jesus, the fucking gall of it.

On the topic of group conformity, and whether people really do believe in TRA ideology - I''m in the middle of reading Paul Theroux's 'Deep South' in which he travels through the deep southern U.S states, observing, meeting and talking to people:

"You think I'm burning this cross and forbidding you to go to school here, and covering up this lynching, but hey, I'm not a racist, really. I'm just trying to get elected"

" We had to claim it was the right thing to do. We needed the votes. You had to get elected no matter the moral cost. Telling the truth and being ethical often keeps people from political power, but doing the right thing is all that matters in the long run, and is ultimately powerful. That's why the true heroes of the civil rights struggle were never politicians...but those enduring sit-ins, and organising marches.....when they began to succeed, the politicians, seeing an opportunity, followed them."

" For many white southerners, pretending to be racist was permissible...you had to be a Southerner to understand the reasoning; it was a cultural thing..You couldn't say nothing, or your friends wouldn't like you. They had that belief, in common with many awkward adolescents, morally muddled, who crave to be popular".

Now of course, many who are campaigning for "trans rights" might say and feel the same kind of sentiments as the above piece; that they too are on the side of truth and justice.......But as I see it, many/most don't really believe that TWAW - but as that is an essential & core belief they have to go along with it.....in order to be seen as being"on the right side of history".

What seems more than clear to me, though, is that the best use of campaigning energy would be into directed into 'third spaces' - so that everyone, in theory, had the right to feel comfort, dignity and safety. As it is, women are being pushed aside, and their very existence and lived reality colonised by a fantasy that has no roots in material reality. Just so that people can be liked, and feel they are 'in' with the cool, liberal crowd.

The sound of two truths clashing........Conflicting truths and interests is the absolute stuff of both politics and journalism....not suppression.

The genderists are becoming so toxic, everything they say and do is easy short hand for regressive values. I was on Hinge the other day - came across two profiles - one where someone had posed with LOJ and another specifying 'no terfs' - i couldn't click past them quick enough. It's great that it's so easy to see who these unthinking numpties are.

This will out me completely, but one of my earliest school memories involves JR opening our school fete. (Local celeb status). Nice to have an 80s celeb memory that is doing the opposite of becoming tarnished with age!

.. What would it look like?

It would look like transgression to me.

The trans juggernaut has become so extreme and so hostile to any debate; to anything other than total compliance that it is now unsustainable....it must surely collapse in a pile of its own contradictions sooner rather than later. You cannot brow-beat or terrorise people into believing in something that runs against measured reality. And if you could get your way under such circumstances conditions, what sort of victory would that be? What would it look like?

The gay women? - well, one campaigned for trans on all women shortlists and if you try to discuss with her pulls out all the insults, won't listen, then says we need 'less heat more light' can't understand why women are upset about men in jail - 'would we feel the same about lesbians'?etc, etc. One posts constantly about Trans people being bullied or suicidal - she seemed surprised I was not keen on men in sports and asked if I thought 'segregation' should begin at infants, I said no, and she disappeared.

She is repeating propaganda.
TRAs target lesbians' empathy.

Helen Belcher (Trans Media Watch & LIbDems) on meeting Martina Navratilova for BBC documentary, 'The Trans Women Athlete Dispute' :
(extract)
"So I asked her what the media’s understanding of lesbian issues was when she came out in 1981. She said something like “awful” or “abysmal”. And she immediately got the parallels.

The point being that the media landscape for trans people in the UK, and increasingly in some other countries, has been absolutely awful for a couple of years now, and the level of understanding displayed is minimal. It was into that situation, where absolutists were making very combative comments meaning that the response had to be equally black-and-white, that her comments about trans inclusion landed.

And this was where the money shot happened, as she fought back the tears. She didn’t want to be seen as an ally of all these awful viewpoints, she’d fought hard for LGBT rights for many, many years, she acknowledged that it was very hard for trans people and she was worried that she’d made things worse. I suspect this is the bit that will be broadcast.

We ended up on some common ground. My view is that hard-and-fast rules will take some time to be found, if they can be found at all, as I suspect there will always be cases that need to be examined on an individual basis. This will need clear principles to be defined, which then means we need to understand what fairness, in terms of competitive and elite sport, actually is." (continues)
challengingjourneys.wordpress.com/2019/06/26/martina-and-me/

BBC
www.bbc.com/sport/48777660

cf 'forced teaming'

It's not just that he pinned his colours to the mast, he also quite comfortably took a solid swipe at two other big(ish) names too. That's not the actions of a person who hasn't been giving things a lot of thought, or who hasn't been paying attention.

From what I understand (or think I know!) about the Ross family they're pretty open-minded and progressive. This is a great turn of events and I'm especially thrilled for Graham Linehan. About time he got some damn support.

I'm fairly sure one of Jonathan's daughters is a lesbian? I think I remember him talking about when she came out.
Thank you for speaking up!