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

[DJLippy]

Goldsmiths, home of witch hunting transwoman Natasha Kennedy needs to sort itself out.

Last night they started harassing a load of 'T*rfs' on Twitter and then today they suggested they might like to spend some time in a gulag - before going on to write a rather long, propaganda piece in their defense.

twitter.com/lgbtqgold/status/1039140880731521025.

I didn't think leftists like this actually existed.

Is this a real account?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3359116-The-Times-smear-campaign-by-trans-lecturer-at-Goldsmiths

Yes Lass. Or indeed anyone who is even vaguely centrist - I'm a classic liberal woolly centrist with slightly lefty tendencies, but apparently I'm a "Nazi" for not believing that women can have a penis and that it's necessary to have rules about who is and is not allowed into a country

The left wing in the UK is currently a dangerous joke but part of that extremism is I think as a result of portraying anyone to the right of centre as a far right bogey man.

Toby Young and 'progressive eugenics' being discussed in a serious fashion at a London University?

Rosie Cooper and the plot to kill her?

I do not want to disagree with you, but there is a rise in the number of far right groups out there, the amount of support they have, more having to be done by security forces to tackle far right extremism and a greater tolerance and normalisation of far right politics and policies.

I do think that the centre and centre right (and even centre left) are being demonised by the left in the same breathe, but I do think it important to highlight how dissatisfaction and poverty are leading to an abandonment of main stream political parties and people seeking out alternatives.

There is also a political vacuum of responsibility that no one is stepping up to and filling that's a huge part of the issue.

Fear is driving things, with people afraid to say anything vaguely sensible. It needs more people to do it to break the spell.

Toby Young and 'progressive eugenics' being discussed in a serious fashion at a London University?

I think you're stretching "serious" to breaking point. He gathered a bunch of non-entities and obvious fascists and held a meeting which is almost the definition of "echo chamber". They managed to blag a room at UCL on the basis of someone's honorary lectureship, but otherwise it was "serious" in the way that a lecture by David Irving was serious history: it had the look and feel if you didn't look or feel too carefully, but was obviously nothing other than a circle jerk by crazies. No-one's opinion was changed, because all the attendees were just as vile before as they were afterwards, and the benefit of them meeting in semi-public is that it's easier to keep an eye on them. Rather in the way that MI5 and MI6 funded a lot of communist organisations in the 1970s, in order to be able to know who was who. That said...

more having to be done by security forces to tackle far right extremism

Given the way in which the "security forces" used the most coercive and deceptive powers of the state to "tackle" amiable eccentrics like Helen Steel and obviously decent people like Doreen Lawrence, you'll pardon my scepticism at the idea that "security forces" getting involved is proof of much beyond the fact that the police do very bad shit on very flimsy legal bases. The investigation into undercover police investigations is completely dead, as they got a pliant rural plod in to "investigate it" and he is as expected doing nothing, but that was not a shining passage in British police history.

Oh I don't know. I think the Far Right have managed to weasel their way into government in a way I would never have thought possible a decade ago. The street thugs are also back. And our culture has proved horribly porous to Far Right discourse.

They are a problem.

And something has gone badly wrong in the Left, with the hounding of moderates.

Politically, things are not great.

It's no accident that MrGoldsmithLGBTQ's twitter thread sounded like a try out for a job as an (unpaid) Novaramedia propaganda-rat.

I think the Far Right have managed to weasel their way into government in a way I would never have thought possible a decade ago

I agree. But I think clowns like Toby Young are red herrings. More worrying is the complete failure of mainstream popular socialism, as it has been submerged by identify politics. That leaves the path open to right wing organisations which were always there, but are now able to sound like their concerns - dressed up with immigration, work, education, crime - are actually perfectly reasonable.

We on the left should think hard about why we use "populist" as an insult.

Toby Young is a direct reaction to universities being ultra left wing though.

It's symptomatic.

Yes it's a small group, but reflects wider dissatisfaction and concern.

Someone with money has the opportunity to exploit fractures.

I can't even start with the problems around the Left, identity politics, and it's failure to actually, honestly, engage with the majority of people.

I don't see any of this ending well.

It's why I - like many others on this thread - just take it as a bad, bad sign that The Guardian (let alone key politicians and union leaders) are silent or collusive here.

It's handing something huge over to the Right - to the Far Right, in fact.

I honestly feel like crying.

And I know Red thinks much the same way. She posted a very coherent summary as to how identity politics isn't an accident, hindering representation and engagement in politics by people, but an actual hate-keeper, keeping them out.

It's just so, so fucked up.

The left wing in the UK is currently a dangerous joke but part of that extremism is I think as a result of portraying anyone to the right of centre as a far right bogey man.

What's a dangerous joke? Nature abhors a vacuum.

Centre left, centre and right is currently without political representation apart from a few MP's who put their head above the parapet; apart from the dead in the water LibDems that is, who couldn't fill an empty condom.

Above the centre's listed above, it is visible within parliament now.

Interesting slip of the finger there. I meant 'gate-keeper' but, bloody hell, 'hate-keeper' kind of works.

Toby Young is a direct reaction to universities being ultra left wing though.

It's not entirely obvious that Toby Young is wronger, unpleasanter or stupider than the LGBQT society of Goldsmiths, who probably think they are left wing. Progressives assume that the virtue of their friends is so obvious that their inanities are excused. From outside, a lot of the right looks and sounds sensible by comparison with the antics of the left.

How long before the BBC and Guardian cotton on to this?

I think flipping Victoria Derbyshire the bird and shouting Fuck You at the end might start the ball rolling.

Another ex-goldsmith student, even 15 years ago the loudest voices were super right on, lecturers as well as students. I can't say I loved my course despite its excellent reputation and since leaving I have met others with the same experience. But don't judge everyone by the loudest people, there were down to earth, non woke types there when I was there and I am sure they are now.

Can we also remember that the reason the Gulag posts came about [and I have been told to get to the Gulag on twitter before so I am well aware of the threat]...this was about the Goldsmiths LGBT group putting a list together to PURGE various feminists. This was the response after being called out on it.

They were breaking rules long before the Gulag thread.

Whoever was responsible should be kicked out of the university or sacked if they are a staff member.

Hate-keeper actually works better as a description of what's happening.

Does anyone have a link to coverage of the flipping the bird incident?

Whoever was responsible should be kicked out of the university

I think it is a very, very dangerous path to do down - one, ironically, beloved of the totalitarian regimes the tweeter is so enamoured of - to start expelling people from educational establishments for views expressed which are several steps removed from the establishment imprimatur.

Clearly, the actions of the Goldsmith SU are proportionate, and clearly they're not going to let the offender within a million miles of a union-affiliated organisation. But if someone stands up in a seminar in Russian History, if Goldsmiths have such a course, and says "you know, the Gulags weren't all bad", then that might be grounds for mockery and it might be, if badly argued, grounds for failing a course. But it is nothing even remotely close to grounds for expulsion. Making martyrs out of free speech is never a good look.

And before Godwin is invoked, yes, the same thing applies to holocaust denial and holomodor denial. Laugh at them. Pick apart their shitty arguments and fail them for misreading and misusing the shitty sources they will have used. Fail them on that assignment. But chuck them out merely for being stupid and wrong? No.

Theyve been right royally shut up by the Goldsmiths student union. result

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/11/soviet-labour-camps-compassionate-educational-institutions-say/
Soviet labour camps were 'compassionate', 'educational' institutions, say trans rights campaigners

Members of Goldsmiths LGBTQ refused to comment when approached by The Daily Telegraph.

Oh bloody hell.
Extreme historical revisionism

Next article by TRA will be telling us how concentration camps were all about
"Arbeit macht frei" / work sets you free = a little gentle work therapy

"Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right ..."

imo, the abysmal standard of politicians in all (English) political parties has left a vacuum in which violent nihilism flourishes

it is a dangerous abandonment of the field by the politicians who are supposed to be the grown-ups

AngryAttackKittens

www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=eaDibfKnKbc

to start expelling people from educational establishments for views expressed which are several steps removed from the establishment imprimatur...But chuck them out merely for being stupid and wrong?

Stupid and wrong is one thing, collecting names of women to purge from twitter - no. Not stupid and wrong. Vindictive and hateful.

From article red posted:

Goldsmiths Students’ Union has now suspended the group and withdrawn its support for its activities, saying the Gulag threat - and subsequent refusal by the group to apologise for it - clearly breached the students' union code of conduct^

In a statement backed by Goldsmiths University the students’ union said: “We condemn the abhorrent content of the tweets and they are in complete opposition to the views and values of the Students’ Union

If we had squillions of £s backing us, a few legal cases from our side, would be in order.

Wow, Tara does not come across well at all there. Unhinged, possibly drunk, and incredibly self absorbed.

Toby Young is a direct reaction to universities being ultra left wing though

Universities are not 'ultra left wing', that's a bizarre generalisation. Some student bodies and some subject areas have more lefties than rightwingers, and some have more on the right than the left (I doubt you'll find many Corbynites at Warwick University Business School, for example). My department (staff and students) spans the full political spectrum from hard right to hard left and we all manage to get along with each other and not threaten to send each other to the gulag. Goldsmiths is a special case - I've never had any dealings with it, but have heard long before this from colleagues, including PoMo colleagues who are on the left, that it's disfunctional and an unpleasant place.

And I suspect Toby Young has always been a complete penis, irrespective of what any university is or isn't like.