Women come last in Labour's deranged victim hierarchy - Rod Liddle in The Spectator

[AttillaThePun]

No punches pulled (but no names named either, probably sensible):

www.spectator.co.uk/2018/01/women-come-last-in-labours-deranged-victim-hierarchy/

YourVagesty
I've moved over to the Times after decades of being a Guardian reader. Cancelled my subscription when I realised that they were trying to actively promote self ID etc, rather than to report the issue and were censoring free speech, especially women.
The paper has balanced reporting. On Brexit it offers both sides (and the comments seem almost universally hostile to the car crash that it is).
There's also a lot of intelligent comments and very little 'shut up you bigot' (as seen btl in the Guardian). The quality of journalism can be excellent. I have been pleasantly surprised.
And frankly, it does me good to read views that don't chime with my own. This divide - left wing, right wing - has done the country no favours as the Brexit vote highlighted.

Maybe Murdoch might divest himself of the Times to improve his chances with Sky...?

Lap dance. The point he makes is that pay at the Beeb is excessive full stop. That’s the reason equal pay can’t happen.

Times sub here too :)

I wonder if this is partly a generational thing. I grew up at the tail end of the cold war, watching events unfold (Solidarity in Poland, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, etc) so I saw that the left could be and often were every bit as authoritarian as the right. Nowadays (Trump being the prime example) we think of authoritarianism as a right wing thing, but in truth, neither has a monopoly on this.

This is Havel's famous essay The Power of the Powerless - the most famous bit of course being the discussion of why the greengrocer really puts the poster saying "workers of the world unite" in his shop window. It's not because he wants to encourage the workers of the world in uniting, nor because he thinks that if they do it will have a positive impact on his greengrocery business. He puts it there to signal "I am one of you, I am - or will pretend to be - ideologically pure, dear secret police you can leave me alone."

Sorry - I don't type fast enough - that was re. the idea that left-wing authoritarians was in any way a surprising juxtaposition.

Re: deplorables, Hairy, that’s the sort of thing that will energise your base, because that’s what tribalism does. Rah rah those guys over there are awful, we must defeat them, take my money!

But you’re right, it was so ill-judged because nothing is private any more, not in politics. Case in point, there are probably TRAs reading this very thread right now. (Hi!)

In the current climate, catty remarks to amuse or incite your base are a dangerous game to play, not because they’re going to enrage the people who already hate you (too late), but because they’re going to make people who don’t much care think “all these people are dreadful, I wash my hands of the lot of them.”

When what we really want is for people to look at the issue when it’s presented factually, without nonsense statistics or outright lies, and make up their own minds.

And it’s happening more and more.

Better to say: "I couldn't give a shit about Rod Liddle's views on X. My position is about self-ID and he's coming out with sense there." Then repeated ad nauseum as a response to every other whataboutery question.

This. Bloody good article in that it says, straight out, in ways female journalists would never get away with, a lot of blunt, clear facts in a way that the average bloke in the street would understand and get annoyed about. That is a huge step forward.

If you're going after an elephant, don't piss about with stamping on every ant on the way.

On Twitter, there are loads of people saying that the fact that "terfs" are agreeing with Rod Liddle should be a wake up call to us as to what bigots we are. I loathe that from of attack. Critique an argument on its own merits. Don't just attack the person arguing and say "well, if they're saying it, it must be wrong!" (Even JJ did it for the crowd funder: "Self-id is a tory manifesto policy for heaven's sakes... which gives us all an idea of just howbad an idea it is.")

Yes I've also subscribed to the times on their three month trial offer they had at New Year.

Fantastic.

Off topic a bit but if you are a sports enthusiast the Torygraph is the paper for you. It's support for and coverage of women's sport is next to none and some of its writers have been excoriating in their attack on those who belittle women's sport.

Or is it a digression? One of the things hamstringing British politics is this "package deal" attitude to political decision making, across the board. And when it becomes the orthodoxy against which you cannot raise questions, it prompts a backlash. I'm pretty sure that played a large part in Brexit.

No not a digression. Its about tribalism and this idea of ideological purity in pursuit of utopia.

Brexit was a product of dishonesty and disaffection with spin. Brexit put fuel on the fire of searching for political integrity and a political revolution. As long as it was different from the status quo it was attractive. It didn't matter what it was as long as it was different. It stacked up along the lines of identity.

Pragmatism, compromise and rationality have become dirty words.

Reality will always catch up with you eventually though, one way or another.

Collidascope I believe that the technique the anti-terfs (for want of better term) are using is poisoning the well, see www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/140/Poisoning-the-Well

This is a feature of their comments, not a bug.

I'm a fan of the FT atm. Not just because of the Presidents Club report but because they've covered issues relating to politics months before the shit has hit the fan of reality of politics and anyone else picks up the story.

Atilla, you're right. We need to be Ceaser's wife. Only measured arguments, no personal attacks. And we can do it - when they go low ...

www.conservativehome.com/leftwatch/2018/01/labours-internal-battle-over-trans-women-and-all-women-shortlists-suggests-its-strategy-of-identity-politics-is-backfiring.html don’t know if you guys saw this.

IWearPurple I was going to say adhominem

And now I’m considering changing my name to Caesar’s Wife. I’d never heard that expression before Faceicle, thank you for introducing me to it!

Hadn't heard of the authoritarian left, going to google

In case anyone hasn't seen this kind of thing, this kind of test can be very interesting to do:

www.politicalcompass.org/test

Not everyone's cup of tea but illuminating to learn about oneself and about others too.

The East German regime would be a pretty typical example of the authoritarian left in full swing, nauticant

That conservativehome piece is basically coming to the conclusion that we should get rid of women's shortlists altogether - presumably also get rid of any support specifically for any disadvantaged group.

Of course that is the logical conclusion of allowing all men, on their say-so, into all women's spaces- get rid of sex segregation completely . I doubt the TRAs will like that at all.

Out of not wanting to do any work interest, I had another go. This time it turns out I'm Gandhi.

So that's good news as far as my Stasi-like tendencies might be concerned.

Don't know if this has been posted before but I think it illustrates the three positions really well.

I'm ambivalent about all of this as on the one hand I think we need to get as many people on board as possible and make others aware of just what's going on but I also realise that the very polarised political culture we have currently (on everything it seems not just the trans issue) means that many folk seeing GC aligned with anything even faintly right wing will mean it is dismissed and ignored at best and put down to bigotry at worst.

I don't know the answer here, I wish I did...

Well done, Kiss, thank you so much for all you have done. Great to see this in the mainstream press. And now that RL has said that he has seen the hit list, hopefully this will encourage the journalists who were not initially interested to pick up the story.

It seems a bit obvious that if we want everyone to agree with us we are going to end up with a lot of different people agreeing with us.

Yes, exactly this. Self-ID isn't an issue that just affects female members of the Labour party - the repercussions of this will affect all women, regardless of their politics.

My MIL, for example, is a staunch Tory and has no interest in identity politics. However, she is also a Times reader so has picked up on this thanks to Janice Turner, and is livid. Let's not forget that self-ID is also a Tory policy, so on this, MIL is not automatically agreeing with 'her' party, but looking at evidence and making her own mind up independently. As are all the women on here.

It's quite a contrast to my right-on, lefty dude DH. Normally, we are pretty much in agreement politics-wise, but he has done a total Ralf Little on this and is blindly chanting 'transwomen are women', because that is what the people who he thinks he 'ought' to agree with are saying. Won't discuss, won't look at any evidence, I'm on the wrong side of history etc. Normally, he is very vocal about his politics, and will argue endlessly with opposing voices, but on this I can see a real fear of having the 'wrong' opinion which is stopping him from engaging with viewpoints which might force him to change his mind.