Any Questions now

[Iknowitisheresomewhere]

Question about Prof Stock case.

"I think we would all feel very angry if people were trying to take away our rights."'

...ermmm?

Except if the 'we' and 'our' are women who should stop being angry and mean and just give their rights away?

Surely if women shouldn’t be ‘rights hoarding dinosaurs’, then neither should anyone else?

@ShadesOfMagenta

Jess Bernard said:

“Trans women are often subject to huge amounts of violence - domestic violence - one of the groups most likely to be targeted by domestic violence”

WTF

Utter nonsense.

Hmm … it’s possible that there is some truth in this.

This US paper suggests that trans people are subject to higher rates of intimate partner violence.

ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305774

Whether that makes them the “most likely” group though, I don’t know. I think just being a woman probably makes you the most likely group.

I'm really getting sick and tired of celebrity and political women making self avowed claims of being pro-feminist and then throwing women under the bus in favour of the men to gain some sort of Crusader of Kindness award.

JB sounds like a 12 year old regurgitating stuff she's heard from her friends with no deeper analysis.

I definitely agree with the professor's point about university not being there to make you feel safe. You're there to be confronted with new ideas, to think critically, to pursue truth.

All very good. But the professor failed to address where this adherence to intolerant 'wokeness' has really come from. And the truth is it is the universities. That is where young people leave home to become adherents to the intolerant ideology. It is a top-down process and not bottom-up.

I'd argue that the quality of many lecturers is poor. Many actively or negligently do not encourage critical thinking. That is they don't encourage students to say uncomfortable things, or challenge prevailing hard held 'evidence' about a subject. I returned to higher education in my late 30s and I would say only around 3 lecturers encouraged students to consider the evidence against certain paradigms, and challenged students answers with questions. Among them two were very old and overdue to retire. The other was just a very thorough researcher who herself interestingly, became a lecturer relatively late in life and studied in Germany.

The rest simply stated 'facts.' or rather their point of view as facts. I found it ironic that many students had work marked down for presenting one side of an argument and not being critical, when that was all they ever had presented to them.

The worst lecturers are those who themselves are already ideologically possessed. I saw one lecturer who was a staunch feminist rain down scorn on a male student who said he disagreed with the pay gap. She cut him off quite rudely in front of the entire hall, embarrassed him and wouldn't even let him continue speaking. IMO that was wrong. She should have let him present his ideas and debated with him, and told him to include it on his essay with evidence.

Similar happened in another lecture about IQ and intelligence between races. There needs to be an enquiry into the state of teaching in institutions of higher education. It's certainly not value for money at the moment.

I work in a university and I can assure you that it’s not coming from us - in fact the appearance of this particular youth culture took everyone by surprise.

I do also use various “youth” social media platforms like tumblr, discord, Reddit etc. and it’s definitely coming from there. It’s been an established internet culture for quite some time now and the students arrive at university already permeated with it.

I felt Caroline Flint was very much trying to continue to sit on the fence. Her started position was that we have to accept women are different and she used the racist trope that black women are different from her in a similar way to the way men who claim they are women are different. So for all her talk of “biology matters” she starts from what I would consider to be the root cause of the current problems, which is that these men are claiming to be women, rather than to be accepted for what they are, which is men who say they would rather be women.

Jess Barnard was frustrating as, unlike Matthew Goodwin, she didn’t stick to the question of freedom of speech, but used her time to, yet again, smear Kathleen Stock and trot out all the tired tropes. What do poor, marginalized, homeless transitioners have to do with privileged university undergraduates, who have so much power within academia that they can bully members of staff, to the point of causing them to be ill with stress, with apparently no consequences.

I would have been very interested to hear Matthew Goodwin to take apart Jess Barnard’s points, rather than stick carefully to the question of academic freedom and freedom of speech, as (unfortunately) he very carefully did.

@foxgoosefinch

I work in a university and I can assure you that it’s not coming from us - in fact the appearance of this particular youth culture took everyone by surprise.

I do also use various “youth” social media platforms like tumblr, discord, Reddit etc. and it’s definitely coming from there. It’s been an established internet culture for quite some time now and the students arrive at university already permeated with it.

Yes, it’s been on Tumblr for perhaps ten years or more. I used to frequent another website where discussion occurred, that was perhaps influenced more from the US and was skewed towards young people, many of whom would doubtless consider themselves “queer”.

For a while, the balance of power lay with the older group, who ran the site. As the new order began to reveal itself, it seemed harmless, and was generally welcomed or tolerated, as the word sex was replaced by “gender” in profiles, and people began to be apparently coy about which of the two options they belonged to.

I helped run it for a while, then left about ten years ago, as I felt I’d done my time, and had been spending more time than I wanted in an administrative role.

I have returned on odd occasions in more recent years, and though the current “staff” are not transactivists, they have obviously long since lost control of the discussion. The board is run by a group of bullies, who use every loophole in the rules to silence those they don’t agree with, and all the more mature members of staff, who might have the strength of character and wiles to rein it in, have obviously got so sick of the subject that they have more or less deserted and given over the board to these people.

It’s well embedded in certain members of that generation, and I suspect wherever they go, they invade and take over, because they are led by master manipulators with enough followers and enough time to spend online, that it appears they make up the majority, while I think the reality is that most people are either too cowed or to weary of what seems like a really stupid debate to speak up. It’s not a new phenomenon at all and I am unsurprised, having witnessed it happen earlier online, on a much smaller scale, to find that universities in the UK are now finding themselves on the wrong end of it.

work in a university and I can assure you that it’s not coming from us - in fact the appearance of this particular youth culture took everyone by surprise.

I do also use various “youth” social media platforms like tumblr, discord, Reddit etc. and it’s definitely coming from there. It’s been an established internet culture for quite some time now and the students arrive at university already permeated with it.

Very interesting, thank you.

Well it needs to be knocked out of them (figuratively speaking) so that they know that the real world is not like the Wild West. There are consequences to actions. Have none of these kids ever had to sit through Sunday school (do I to others, etc?)

Just listened to this - what I think is a development is that rather than all having their little say and being quiet, which I think is what used to happen, there was pushback from other panellists towards what Jess was saying.

I don't think that would have happened a while ago; people said what they wanted to say but didn't want to engage with each other.

Bracing myself for Any Answers now...

I'm catching up on the programme and thread. Fucking hell Jess's use of statistics etc was horrendous and misplaced. I wish someone had picked up up on those stats about trans women and domestic violence.

Matthew Goodwin was great, and the others too.

Who is Jess again?

Honestly, that woman needs to get to grips with the experiences of Transwidows

@KittenKong

Who is Jess again?

Young Labour

Young Labour what tho? (Tory plant?)

@foxgoosefinch

I work in a university and I can assure you that it’s not coming from us - in fact the appearance of this particular youth culture took everyone by surprise.

I do also use various “youth” social media platforms like tumblr, discord, Reddit etc. and it’s definitely coming from there. It’s been an established internet culture for quite some time now and the students arrive at university already permeated with it.

It's all come from the US.

I was randomly researching eyfs good practise and found a brilliant article by an academic in the US about 5 years ago about exactly what I was looking for, that then andomly split into her and her husbands issues with woke scared students on campus, and their attempts to point out exactly what Goodwin outlined in this programme around the importance of free speech and critical analysis debate etc.

Listened to it. Agree what others said. I think that Caroline found was trying to present her points in an acceptable way, but the point she was making was definitely not pro gender ppl want to hear. It's any questions now.

@KittenKong

Young Labour what tho? (Tory plant?)

Recent kerfuffle

https://labourlist.org/2021/09/young-labour-chair-under-investigation-by-party-over-anti-transphobia-tweets/?fbclid=IwAR0c9Z4LvS7fXp18gHvKu7x6bViLhkgMtAJ8g2woNEmjx55_DIQVY47ewtQ

I feel the choice of guests was exceptionally clever. Pitching Goodwin against Bradbury. He was actually v good at not getting sucked into the trans debate and stuck to the point.

Matthew goodwin's interview on Triggernometry is exceptionally interesting watching as he explains how bad getting into culture identity wars has been for Labour et al.

I thought the debate was good.

Jess spewed misinformation and nonsense speak in a way only a ideological zealot can do.

They aren’t letting any one on Any Answers to discuss this….

Discussing misogyny now, doubt if they'll have time for Stock.

@foxgoosefinch

I work in a university and I can assure you that it’s not coming from us - in fact the appearance of this particular youth culture took everyone by surprise.

I do also use various “youth” social media platforms like tumblr, discord, Reddit etc. and it’s definitely coming from there. It’s been an established internet culture for quite some time now and the students arrive at university already permeated with it.

This is an interesting point, because those spaces are open to abuse by troll farms and sustained manipulation of opinion by malign agents. You could say the same of MN, I guess, but people are expected to back up their arguments with robust evidence here and posters will challenge shonky stats and reporting. We are fortunate to have a breadth of disciplines and professions here and scientifically/statistically literate posters who can unpick crap arguments. It’s one of the things I like about MN.

@dapsnotplimsolls

Discussing misogyny now, doubt if they'll have time for Stock.

They always leave any trans-related stuff till the end; there's never enough time.

Anita Anand has steered very determinedly away from this debate on previous programmes.

Not a mention. Again.