Good T**f, Bad T**f Julie Berchill article about Leftwing feminism

It's reminding me of Mother Teresa's face on a blueberry muffin. Or Jesus on the arse of a dog.

That took me an awfy long time to find. Quite a sort of cute and cuddly version of Beelzebub.

Well, I'm wholly convinced by AF's rhetoric and pithy way with an image.

Definitely looks akin to a cloven foreleg to me. If the camera shot pulls back, will it reveal Satan like it did in 9/11 photographs?

www.markdphillips.com/satan-in-the-smoke/

Doesn’t matter. If their only action at my withdrawal of support is to call me names then I know I’m justified in my belief that they think I owe them everything, while they nothing to me.

Very well put, Alienated.

I don’t think either the left or the right have much to offer women. We are not considered full human beings. To the right we are private property, to the left we are public property.

Is this like Miasma Theory?

Blimey. Bring a gas mask if you ever visit Italy. In my tiny corner alone I rub shoulders with self declared communists and fascists on a daily basis.

I’m coming to the conclusion that many in the anglo-sphere genuinely think “far right” is just a handy card to play in debate instead of making an argument. Comfortable with a sensation that it’s mostly a thing of the past (for them and their loved one, oh dear how sad never mind for the foreign types) and we don’t have to preserve its meaning for the sake of effectively alerting people by calling wolf, when an actual be-fanged creature turns up.

IME women are not more left wing than men because “progress” is change and change can be difficult, full of unintended consequences and dangerous when you are trying to keep small humans alive. We have been told we’re supposed to vote left though, for decades. Cos we need to “be kind”, make no considered judgments (or being judgmental as it is now known) and grateful for what we’ve been given. All my politically aware life all I’ve heard is the right hate women (while creating the only 2 “wrong kind of woman”
PMs Britain has ever had) and the left wants to take care of me.

Unfortunately the left have repeatedly demonstrated, and not just in the U.K. either, that we are the base they feel they have in the bag, so they don’t have to try and give us anything more than lip service. So comfortable in feeling like we’re out of political options beyond them that they can take the word that describes us and make it meaningless.

Bollocks to idea that my loyalty to the left must remain despite all their efforts to make my landscape harder, bleaker, less safe. Also bollocks to the idea that I care anymore what names they call me. The T word, the FR label, hell call me a Nazi. Doesn’t matter. If their only action at my withdrawal of support is to call me names then I know I’m justified in my belief that they think I owe them everything, while they nothing to me.

Plus.. I’ve expanded my philosophical horizons since I moved away from on “the right = wrong about everything”.

I’m having to examine long held beliefs that I picked up when young, cos all the other people on my (leftie) side said it was right and in my Snakebite haze it seemed to make sense. I’m challenging what and how I think about so many issues. It won’t surprise me if I’ll be so changed by the experience of having to open my mind beyond the colour red that even if the left gets its act together I’ll no longer agree with them about enough things to a great enough degree to ever vote for them again. So in that regard, I guess I owe them one for giving me the impetus to belatedly re-examine where I stand and why I stand there.

How very dare you, antifascist!

Some noxious fumes

You can't see noxious fumes can you, you can only smell them.

Maybe your nose is too near your arse, as my dear mother likes to say...

I really like Straw Dogs - John Gray is a great thinker.

Of course Burchill is right to say that women have been badly let down by the left. It's very hard to discover how much these supposedly progressive men hate us.

But you can't just give up being left. I am not going to stop believing in things like a free, universal health service, the right of ordinary people to a good quality education, the requirement for employers to provide sick pay and pensions and to keep people safe at work, or the importance of the state providing good public amenities such as parks and leisure centres. The fact that the other people who supposedly believe the same things turn out to be nasty little misogynists is massively disappointing, but it's not going to make me start believing that the government should cut taxes or tear up health and safety legislation.

Anyway, finally read the article.

I'd love to see both Julies in conversation, actually.

I so much admire so many of the women involved in - well, whatever anyone wants to call this movement. Or loose collection of grassroots movements, or acts, or actions, invididual women. The wit, intelligence, bravery and collective energy is really quite astonishing. I like the disagreements; I think they are a great corrective, necessary, healthy.

More power to all of you, wims.

'right side of history' is a wonderfully batty phrase that underlines this idea that there is a right and a wrong and we won't know until later what that actually is (exactly mirrors the idea of afterlifes being based on our sins/karma/merits).

It's politically probably quite useful, in that it suggests one isn't able to always know at the time of acting whether one is making the correct choice - presumably this means we have to rely on someone else who is more knowledgeable than us to make the decision for us.

Yes, I'm halfway through 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray, which looks at exactly this utopian idealism and suggests it's based very much on our Judeo-Christian/Abrahamic ideas of redemption and salvation. The 'arc of history' leading to some mythical utopia; quite a powerful misunderstanding. Same goes for evolutionary theory that operates on an idea that evolution is progressing towards something rather than (as I understand it) being based on the survival of the fittest of various random accidental mutations.

@LaughingPriest The only fascist user title I can see on this thread or any other is "antifascist". What do you mean? Report any of it to MNHQ.

And what does fascism mean to you?

The thought that we must abide by the ideology that men can become women just by them saying words, otherwise we are racists is absurd.

I watched Triggernometry last night with a journalist who pointed out at Trump's ability to not give a shit about being called a racist and not cowering to those that accused him of it, showed up the supposed left who would do anything to not be associated with Trump, including not agreeing with anything he said, to avoid being called racist. And that includes identity politics. So we have this because of Trump, people who were too scared to stand up to what is right, just to avoid the association.

And people come on here, heavily influenced by American activism, to try and do the same. Not realising that most of the cases that are going to or have been in court, have been brought by women who are not white.

I always thought it was age - generally people get more right-wing as they age not everyone but it's a general trend.

But I went looking

www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/young-women-are-more-left-wing-than-men-study-reveals/

Young women are more left wing - older women more likely right wing.

Given 60s population bulge and that older voter turn out much more - there are likely more older women voters at moment.

I'm left wing and I just realised being disappointed in the labour party has become tiresomely familiar. Iraq war, tougher on benefits, antisemitism and, now, gender ideology. I think I'm not a supporter of labour, just usually they're the least worst option. This time though...

This is true of quite a lot of id politics things though. Corporations are also happy to lap up things like anti-racism, BLM, sometimes women's issues, and all the rest. LGB causes were a favorite for a while because it meant people with no special issues which needed to be accommodated.

It's a great distraction technique for corporations and political parties but I don't think that is all that is going on.

If gender ideology did a single thing to trouble our dominant structure on society (that of favouring white middle class males) does anybody seriously think corporations would have been so eager to lap it up and virtue signal their compliance?

It is the most individualist, capitalist wet dream. And so utterly regressive in its desire to fit humans into artificial pink or blue gender boxes.

I suspect a lot of the cultural elites on the Left would never watch that kind of tv show.

The whole weird dynamic between the left and the women who cling on to it can be seen in a statement by A Woman’s Place made in response to Kellie-Jay’s tweet: ‘We know failure to recognise the concerns of women, as well as active mistreatment of women on and by the parts of the political left has led to many becoming estranged or ostracised from the socialist and labour movement. Our values remain of the left and progressive, and we still believe that equality, justice and solidarity are worth fighting for.’

I think this quote is interesting and gets to the heart of the disagreement in some ways.

It seems to very accurately describe how some feel. To put it on it's head, they can't leave the left because another political position would not be progressive, and would not be about justice, and would not believe in equality or solidarity.

So the underlying idea is that the left, and the left alone, believe in solidarity, justice, and progressivism, and leaving the left would mean abandoning those things.

I think that maybe what Berchill is getting at is, that assumption needs to be scrutinized. Maybe it's not only the left that believes in justice. Maybe we need to ask what is meant by solidarity and equality, and whether those ideas only exist on the left.

I think there are quite a lot of people who have asked that in relation to organizations like the Labour Party, and have come to the conclusions that the assumption that those values only exist on one side is wrong. And instead that there are people in both parties who value those things, and some who don't, and a greater difference is how they see those values functioning in society.

The idea of political progressivism is perhaps somewhat different, I think that a certain number of people have begun to think that as a concept or ideology it may be fatally flawed, and in fact part of what allowed gender ideology to take hold and flourish. Because in practice it amounts to a kind of utopianism, the idea of a "right side of history" and an assumption that we know what constitutes progress. And so it stymies looking at policy ideas from the perspective of pros and cons and thinking about unexpected effects over time.

I cannot for the life of me understand how so many of the so called Left have decided to support this ideology, when you actually have a recording the mother of one of the USA's most high profile transitioned children clearly state she wanted to avoid having a homosexual son.

Left "matches" West, and Right "matches" East. Therefore if you live in the West and are right-wing, your politics don't align with your location, and you are transpolitical.

One is a physical compass location, the other is a nebulous group of ideas loosely forming under the headings Left and Right in our society.

Some of us might think that the idea that these two separate concepts can 'match' or 'mismatch' seems absurd.

Haha that's quite a funny and refreshing article.

At the end of the day JB1 and JB2 are both great feminists and neither deserve attacks from extreme political activists.