Political dissidents

[TalkingtoLangClegintheDark]

Listening to the news the other day, someone from UK Twitter was talking about the renewed demands to end anonymity for social media users, and saying that potentially endangers political dissidents.

I know she didn’t mean women like us, but it made me think - that’s what we are. Political dissidents. Here, in a western democracy, we do not have the freedom to say what we think, to hold opinions that run contrary to those approved by the government.

This is particularly the case in Scotland, of course, where their odious “hate crime” law is just repression disguised as protection for minorities. What is Marion Millar if not a political dissident? She is being persecuted and prosecuted for publicly expressing opinions that are currently not permissible according to Holyrood.

And of course we have it this side of the border too: Harry Miller, Graham Linehan, Posie, Maggie Nelson have all been spoken to by the police simply for holding views that are and certainly should be perfectly legal, but are being nonetheless criminalised by police forces across England. As far as we know, the police are still recording “hate incidents” against people’s names, without them ever having the chance to defend themselves.

And how many women are there all over the UK, and in other western democracies, who dare not use their real names on SM for fear of the repercussions, including potential criminal proceedings?

Surely this is the mark of an oppressive political regime - where those who dissent from the “approved” ideology of the day cannot freely express their own opinions? I’ve been struggling to put a name to where we are - this feeling of being circumscribed in what we are able to say in public, open discourse - for some time now: years, even - and I think this is actually it. We are dissidents against the ideology of genderism that has captured almost the entire Establishment in a shockingly, stunningly short space of time.

It would seem that our democracy is far more fragile, and closer to those authoritarian regimes that we more usually think of as producing dissidents, than we ever realised before.

It would seem that our democracy is far more fragile, and closer to those authoritarian regimes that we more usually think of as producing dissidents, than we ever realised before.

Looking at what is being posted to Margaret Atwood and the ongoing abuse of JKR, does any of us doubt what would happen to us? And MN in particular, couldn't possibly afford parents to be concerned their children could be identified by proxy.

An authoritarian system is already in place but there's negligible overhead for maintaining it as we're self-editing ourselves and other people are still reporting us (and a social media platform is taking sides - see the global/transborder oligarchy that is over-represented in silicon valley).

It would seem that our democracy is far more fragile, and closer to those authoritarian regimes that we more usually think of as producing dissidents, than we ever realised before

You can say that again!
Encouraging students to denounce teachers and those in authority for wrongthink and then those denounced losing their jobs is like the Soviet Union.

It's indirect discrimination of women, because women are more likely to speak out about women's rights, and we are being prevented from doing so for fear of persecution.

The government will have a lot to answer for once the true extent of the Stonewall scandal is exposed.

Although that's assuming they have a system that's able to hold them to account if the judiciary have been captured by Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence too.

The best that we can hope for is anonymity to protect us in current circumstances while we practice our dissent. That is a very low bar but it's futile to pretend otherwise.

I've been quoting these in a number of threads so: Solzhenitsyn's Live not by lies and Robert Lifton's Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China are relevant to what is happening.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4382551-Live-not-by-lies-Solzhenitsyn-no-tambourines-involved?

Vaclav Havel's The Power of the Powerless is 1978 and a very different system but still all too familiar:

hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23

Thank you for those links, Hadrosaurus. It’s a well trodden path, this, isn’t it.

Just not one I ever thought we’d have to tread here.

It still seems so weird - that those things which always happened Over There are now happening Over Here.

Of course it’s not on the same level - we do at least have elections here and an elected, accountable government, as far as that goes.

But before the Tories cottoned on to the fact this policy wasn’t the greatest vote winner ever, self ID was being promoted by every single major or semi respectable political party. Every single one of them. And the government still has some very worrying links with the genderists, even newly minted ones.

And what about the USA? Where the only choice last election was Trump and his old school misogyny or Biden and his wokey modern misogyny? What kind of a choice was that for a woman who cares about her own and other women’s rights? None at all.

It really is not just indirect but I think fairly direct discrimination against and persecution of women, because we are the ones primarily affected and, as you say, Longines, most likely to speak out about it.

I honestly don’t know which I find more worrying though, in a way - the entrenched misogyny or the creeping authoritarianism that threatens everyone.

I am nonetheless immensely heartened by Patel’s statement on trans sex offenders, and the fact she’s said that will hopefully lead to greater freedom for other women to say similar, but this is a long way from being over. And it’s not great for our democracy either to have one party in power indefinitely - but the prospect of a Labour government is just something I don’t want to contemplate, with the party as it is now.

If they write the law correctly they could still protect our anonymity by saying that we would not need to post under our own name just be required to sign up/register with our real name so if someone posts say any of the death and rape threats that certain people like to do the police could just go to Facebook, twitter or mumsnet and ask them for the real name of any poster and the company would be required to hand it over and then the police would have no excuse for not doing there job and arresting them

But I’m pretty sure Marion Millar didn’t issue any rape or death threats. All she has done, as far as I’m aware, is post her own opinions, which are not in line with Scottish government approved ones.

What happens if you sign up with your own name and then the government passes a law saying that correctly identifying someone’s sex is a hate crime? Which we are very close to already. We are already told that deliberately misgendering someone in for example a work setting could be seen as harassment.

(But male people putting their female colleagues in the position of having to share their toilets and changing rooms with a male when they don’t want to, and being compelled to lie about the sex of said male person - that’s not seen as harassment at all, of course.)

In the current climate, female prisoners who refuse to use female pronouns for a male prisoner who’s been housed with them face being punished by serving extra time.

(Male prisoners who harass women prisoners by being in their prison in the first place, and by demanding they lie, face no consequences at all, of course.)

The system is still in thrall to genderist ideology, and still fundamentally stacked against women. Women still aren’t safe under this system.

Which is why I can’t see that plan working.

Some of us have been warning for years that the left’s obsession with toxic, divisive identity politics, hierarchies of victimhood and policing language would end in repression, purges and draconian restrictions on freedom of speech.

And here we are.

Meanwhile, the right keeps the ‘culture war’ pot boiling, laughs as the left tears itself apart and continues to govern the country.

Actually, Hoardasurass your post demonstrates perfectly the point of this thread.

The system you propose would work very well in a genuinely free and democratic society. Especially one where half the population didn't have a great deal more political, cultural and economic power than the other half. Where half the population hadn’t oppressed the other half quite viciously over several millennia. Where the legacy of that oppression and control wasn’t still alive and well in the form of both institutionalised misogyny, and a cultural layer of misogyny too deep to fathom in society in general.

That’s my point. We’re not living in that world. We’re not living in a genuinely open, free, democratic society where all individuals are presumed to have equal worth, all have equal status and human rights as a starting point.

We’re living in a world that has not remotely thrown off the effects of misogyny through the ages, and which is now displaying distinctly authoritarian tendencies. Put the two together and it’s a minefield for independently-minded women.

Your nice, reasonable proposal needs a nice, reasonable world to operate in. But that’s not where we are. We’re somewhere very different from where we thought, for a while, we were.

We’re not living in that world. We’re not living in a genuinely open, free, democratic society where all individuals are presumed to have equal worth, all have equal status and human rights as a starting point

Agreed (I know I'm EH and not Hoardasurass). We don't have equal access to the public square for discussion and the infrastructure for that doesn't exist for us.

To mix the phenomena, the silencing of the plurality and the deplatforming of women and GC feminists from the agora (social media and from speaking engagements) produces preference falsification and puts false boundaries on the Overton window that does happen in the public space. And in general the public has no idea that this is happening and would find it hard to understand why they should care.

Preference falsification: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a4231025-Maya-Forstater-s-appeal-discussion-thread-2?msgid=106887898#106887898

That's my current frustration, trying to convince people why they should care. Most people really dont grasp the implications.

@Libertaire

Some of us have been warning for years that the left’s obsession with toxic, divisive identity politics, hierarchies of victimhood and policing language would end in repression, purges and draconian restrictions on freedom of speech.

And here we are.

Meanwhile, the right keeps the ‘culture war’ pot boiling, laughs as the left tears itself apart and continues to govern the country.

Yes.

And TBH I find it sometimes a little frustrating in discussions here. Because while it's completely sensible that in a discussion around women's rights you will mostly talk about that aspect, none of this is independent of the bigger picture. That's what is causing this.

There are people who see it, the problems in universities and schools, that sort of thing. But lots don't see that it's the same thinking that is in place in many other SJ movements now and will or has proved to be just as toxic.

There are people who see it, the problems in universities and schools, that sort of thing. But lots don't see that it's the same thinking that is in place in many other SJ movements now and will or has proved to be just as toxic.

I know - it was hard enough when we were dealing with people who couldn't see how the patriarchy was affecting every aspect of our lives, and now it's that on top of this (obviously compounded by the fact no one believed us about how oppressive gender stereotypes were before all of this).

Of course, this is just another form of patriarchal oppression, but what's so insidious about this version is that instead of the issue being something people can't see because it's everyone's 'normal' and what they grew up with, it's out in the open as a brand new regime, but billed as the only way to be if you're not mean and selfish.

It was bad enough when feminism was a dirty word and people would roll their eyes, but at least we could talk about it before all this without fear of persecution.

I shouldn't be but I'm increasingly surprised at the number of times that I see FWR and football fans overlap in a shared interest in freedom to dissent and to protest without incurring a investigation.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10128457/Police-enquiry-racism-allegations-Crystal-Palace-fan-group-SLAM-Newcastles-Saudi-owners.html

This is a chilling effect and it's encompassing people who are engaging in familiar forms of dissent and protest.

Let us not forget the plan/intention to remove our right to judicial reviews, one of the few tools that amplify the voice of the powerless.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/25/judicial-review-peoples-right-fight-government-destroy-courts-undemocratic

Yes. It's almost like there has been a political coup and no one noticed.

I've been wondering at this for a while. Does the loss of freedom, or the collapse of a culture, often happen like this?

Not an invasion or civil war or a military coup. Just a quiet change in the air, unnoticeable at first but spreading steadily until, just at the point where people are starting to think "Something's going on", it's there all around you and you're too late.

No one wanted it, but now no one dares protest. And you've lost something essential, which you hadn't protected because you thought it was indestructible.

It's a very entrenched issue. Like @Libertaire, I've been thinking for a while that a problem was in the offing. I think I first said it when the press didn't report on Cologne... Almost six years ago now.

If the Left wasn't prepared to have a conversation about this, the Right was going to make hay. And lo...

We have ended up with a situation where a huge amount of public discourse isn't there to explore the facts, but rather is being used to push a particular political line. Not just about gender - also history, also rural affairs/ conservation. It's incredibly disheartening to realise just how many people are either deeply deluded or just not honest actors, who are prepared to cherry-pick and misquote in order to prove their point. It's even worse when they are in positions of influence and thus able to influence the tone of public debate. It's enraging when you have expertise in a particular topic and read something and think 'WTF? No, he did NOT say that. No, that was NOT how that happened - didn't you read the diary that... oh, you cite it but chose to ignore it.'

I'd also like to say that I have enjoyed @EmbarrassingHadrosaurus's posts about Solzhenitsyn and Robert Lifton. I need to go back and reread them, because I'm too knackered at the moment to take much in, but when I read them I thought, yes, this is the sort of grounding I need.

Sorry, this a rather inarticulate and muddled post compared to a lot of what is posted on this board, but I have a couple of glasses inside me and I'm knackered.

I've been wondering the same thing @thinkingaboutLangCleg. I'm very worried that by the time you notice it, it's too late. That includes myself, having become interested in this only within the past three years or so, and I suspect will definitely be the case for people who fail or refuse to recognise the problem.

Does the loss of freedom, or the collapse of a culture, often happen like this?
I was thinking within the past couple of days about the fall of the Roman Empire. I don't know enough about it to draw comparisons, though.

However, I have lived under two different repressive governments (as in, a family friend wound up dead for expressing Wrong Think), and we aren't there yet.

Wow, Grumpyosaurus, that’s in a whole different league and I’m so sorry for your/your family’s loss - absolutely agree that we’re not there yet, obviously, but I suppose it has to start somewhere and the intention to close down free speech, to make some things unsayable, is the common root. It is deeply worrying to think where it could lead.

I too have thought about the decline of the Roman Empire in a whole new light over the last few years - suddenly it makes sense in a way it never did before, just as I feel I understand the rise of outright authoritarian regimes, and how they were/are enabled to flourish, better than I did before.

Sorry, I read as family member not family friend, but still awful, obviously.

It's enraging when you have expertise in a particular topic and read something and think 'WTF? No, he did NOT say that. No, that was NOT how that happened - didn't you read the diary that... oh, you cite it but chose to ignore it.'

Good point. I have this reaction often when I read things that I know fundamentally misrepresent what is/was actually the case. And there is all too much stuff out there that does misrepresent the facts.

I only remember him vaguely as a nice bloke - I was young at the time - but my parents were very shaken up by it. It's something that has always made me appreciate living in a democracy.

I’ll bet.