Do you ever wonder, what else have I been horribly wrong on all this time?

[JaneorEleven]

Do you ever wonder, what else have I been horribly wrong on all this time? If I was SO wrong on those that are GC, what else have I been wrong on?

All my life I’ve been solidly left leaning, and pretty much agreed with most points on the left. I’ve described myself as an old fashioned socialist, love the idea of the NHS, a safety net for lower income people and unemployed, social and economic equality, disability rights, rights for women all tied up with feminism including being pro-choice, LGB and the TQ etc rights, you name it, I supported it.

I had previously been very sympathetic to Trans issues, and had a friend who transitioned, and I supported this person as best I could. But after some time of researching and I guess educating myself for lack of a better expression, I did a complete uturn on this, and found myself agreeing with many wise GC women. It was a bell I couldn’t unring. And Mumsnet played a large part in this.

I’m British now living in the US, and find myself busy Terfing USA. I’ve listened to NPR for years, nodding along, but now almost daily, they have a segment that infuriates me with regards to Trans issues. Could be anything from “trans kids” not getting their meds, to prisons, to bathrooms, schools, and they support it all. Female reporters who I held in high esteem, interviewing and fawning over transwomen, platforming them and letting them hold court without challenging them.

These past few weeks, I’ve started to question myself. How could I have been so wrong on this? I thought GC peeps, or Terfs, were full of hate and lacked patience and understanding.

Which leads me to ask, on what else have I been so badly wrong? Anyone else think like this? Now I don’t think I’m a closet right winger, but is it possible I’ve allowed the left to lead me up the garden path on other issues too?

@Aintnosupermum
totally agree. I can usually filter out annoying things on social media, but I found the anti Amber Heard onslaught to be extremely upsetting and quite obviously part of a co ordinated campaign that she did not have the money or clout to counter.

I am not taking ‘sides’ here. AH is not a particularly likeable person and does not strike me as being a person of integrity. But whatever ‘side’ you are on it was really, really clear from the trial that JD has an unscrupulous and toxic personality (perhaps they both do). But he was obviously paying for SM chatter which painted him as a harmless, loveable rogue.

Neither of them were harmless, loveable eccentrics but only one of them had the money and clout to whitewash the murky reality.

I'm not Wauden, but I googled and I think this is the link.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-51467518

The 8 at the end was missing from the other link.

I do believe that when you have a couple like Heard and Depp, they are both narcissistic and the sum of two equals five. Elon Musk stayed very quiet about Heard and quietly supported her. He paid her legal bills. Not that I think Musk is a great guy, but for him to pay the legal bill, the abuse must have been real and obvious to others who had no skin in the game. Yes he is a billionaire so it’s not much money to him, but you don’t get involved in that sort of thing lightly.

Speaking of Twitter, it will be interesting to see what happens there. Tesla is run by east Europeans and Russians who are highly educated and hard working. I’m expecting Twitter to be run by the same group of people and for the content to be monitored using AI, therefore there is potential for so much more nonsense will get through, both far right and far left. In my dreams, eventually the two groups will implode and it will become a moderate chamber of comment.

@OldCrone
thanks for the link.
I agree that it does look like a certain amount of gang led grooming has been played down. But,
I am really wary of jumping on the ‘foreigners molest our white girls’ bandwagon.

What more or less all these stories have in common is men abusing women. It’s an overarching story about male violence rather, than immigrant crime.

It isn’t ’foreigners’ but extremist men with anti-western, misogynist beliefs. Their crimes are racially aggravated because they see white girls as lower than dogs.

We should be able to recognise the truth of it without implying our own recognition is motivated by racism and xenophobia.

Is there a "‘foreigners molest our white girls’ bandwagon"? The story here is that the authorities were too scared to take action for fear of being branded racist, even when they knew who was committing these crimes.

Ethnic minorites should not be above suspicion just because people are scared of being called racist.

theconversation.com/asian-grooming-gangs-how-ethnicity-made-authorities-wary-of-investigating-child-sexual-abuse-130099

@Byfleet the survivor in this video leaves you in no doubt that these crimes are racially aggravated.

There are definitely differences in the nature of sexism, among other things, in different cultures. And in some, there is an idea that white women are particularly sexually immoral.

I am not sure why it would ever be a surprise that different cultures can have some really different ideas about things, or different values. This is one of those areas where I find the progressive insistence that anyone who immigrates from a very different culture will just somehow let go of all of those ideas as soon as their foot hits the soil very weird.

That's not to say all such different ideas are bad, some aren't better or worse, some are better, arguably. But not all, and why would anyone imagine that they would be?

Yes @MangyInseam. It’s also important to remember this to protect girls and women from ‘honour’-based violence, forced marriage, FGM and so on. When there’s an influx of refugees from Afghanistan, for example, there are going to be a good number of Taliban sympathisers among them, and there are now Afghan women in the UK looking over their shoulder, never able to relax, in case someone who knows them and sees them doing something forbidden, like having a job or going to college, shops them to their family. It’s no good to plaster on a smile and ignore misogyny in the name of cultural sensitivity.

Sadly, yes, there are women being abused and murdered by their partners, but being executed by your family to restore patriarchal ‘honour’ is not across all cultural backgrounds.

I don't think I am becoming more right wing but I am now very very aware of how much doesn't get reported by mainsteam reputable newspapers. Lia Thomas swam and won in a meet in Harvard - up the road from me. our local newspaper The Boston Globe reported it in the sports section well below results of high school sports. It has made me think what else doesn't get reported.

I feel lucky that at my old workplace, where I was the only woman on the team, we discussed trans issues openly (we all knew a couple of younger women undergoing surgery). I struggled to make sense of how you could feel you were in the wrong body and want undergo radical surgery on a healthy body. There was nothing pro or anti about our conversations but they were open and candid and honest as we tried to make sense of our own thoughts and listened to each other. The place I work now, I could never have those chats. I have no clue how people feel. I opened the conversation once and the silence was deafening. I think if we can't have open debate, it can stunt our thinking as a society, making it narrow and simplistic.

@ilovesushi a community group I am on - we talk about many issues. The minute gender ideology comes up. All the women go SILENT. No comment. No likes. No nothing. I am flummoxed as to why.

@Byfleet Sorry, links are not working for me, so search for Operation Bullfinch and the Serious Case Review. Tragically, young girls were not believed because of the ethnic origins of the rapists, child pimps and men who did unspeakable things.

I worry about the fact that these men will one day he released from prison and it could happen again and people ignore the girls because of blinkered attitudes.

@ilovesushi You say that you were the only woman on the team at the place you could freely discuss the trans movement. I guess by implication the current place where you can't has a lot more women. Do you think that has something to do with being blanked when raising it there? Is it your impression that it's because the women there are more supportive of the trans movement or simply that the environment is more consensus seeking and therefore less willing to allow to discussion. If you're willing to share your impressions of course.

This is an excellent thread, and I'd like to thank all the contributors.

I used to be very trusting of most sources of information that had some sort of a reputation behind them - academics, broadsheet newspapers. That has gone in the last 10-12 years. I've found rampant (and slanted, so either blinkered or deliberate) misrepresentation in academic work in my own specialist field (as in, the numbers not matching the source, that type of thing). I've lost all faith in the Guardian as a bastion of truth.

And I've come across stunning ignorance in people who are quite sure that they are right about a topic. A few years ago I had a huge stand-up row with my BIL about Israel and antisemitism in Labour. He was parroting the approved Corbyn line, with zero knowledge about the people and places involved.

I'll be honest: while I am still left-leaning, it's all made me more right wing. I just don't trust the left any longer. I don't trust the right either, so I'm politically homeless.

The thing is you've to put Thatcher"s quotation into the historical context.

In 1979, Britain had to go to the IMF for a loan because there was no money. And I mean, no money. It was, and still is, the largest loan the IMF has ever given to a sovereign state. And, if course, it had strings attached.

But the British state simply couldn't pay for the liabilities it had incurred. A lot of those liabilities were at local level, taken out by Councils, and those, at the time, were part of the PSBR, which was huge. As a country, we could not fund it.

That's the background to Thatcherism. We were, at that time, far worse than Greece in 2008.

Something had to give. And that's the reason why as much as possible over the ensuing decade was shifted into private hands: council houses, utilities, land etc. The state could not afford to fund it; it was broke and the economy was stuck in an inflationary spiral.

But an expectation had arisen postwar that the state and "society" would provide. But it wasn't quite the expectation we would assume to be conventional today.

For example, there were councils who took local children on seaside holidays every year. Now back in the 50s, when it had started, it was part of the scheme to tackle slum areas and chronic deprivation. Good idea.

But by the mid 70s, you had a situation where you had families who were working and earning a decent wage, living in new council houses where their only costs were food and heat. Pretty much everything else was either paid for and subsidised by the local Council, even their kids' yearly holiday to the coast.

And this then bred a lifestyle whereby those families, well, they spent all their free time at the pub and at bingo because they hardly had to spend their wages on anything. 😂

That's the mentality that Thatcher was trying to chip away at. It's that 70s mentality that "society" should feed, clothe, house, educate, and warm your kids, and even take them on holiday every year, while you slowly work your way through several thousand pints of Watneys.

.

I'll be honest: while I am still left-leaning, it's all made me more right wing. I just don't trust the left any longer. I don't trust the right either, so I'm politically homeless.

I've become accustomed to this uncomfortable position. It would be very much easier if I was to the right, politically, but I'm not.

So I occupy a permanently uncertain state. It has at least prompted me to do a lot more research on what all the positions actually mean in real terms. And generally speaking I think the middle ground is a good thing.

I was raised to look at both sides of a debate before making up my mind and to look for the outcome that best meets everyone's needs. So I dont very often need to change my views because there is rarely enough new evidence to make that appropriate. Still left wing, still wouldnt vote for the tories. Ironically what might make me do so would be feeling that the economy would be safer with them and they've blown that chance. But labour still reside too often in cloud cuckoo land* and I wont give up women's rights for that. *

Spoilt my ballot paper last time. Whether I hold my nose and vote Labour or abstain at the next election depends on whether Starmer develops a backbone and starts respecting women's rights or Sunak screws up the economy even further and I feel I have to vote for the economically literate. Because however idiotic Starmer is over women's rights at the moment he seems more likely to deal with economic damage than the tories. I wont forget the incompetent way lockdown was handled and the contracts for the boys, I dont forget that selling off council houses was a disaster, that the tories mates in the banks caused a financial crisis and banks were sold off too cheaply, that privatisation has often been a disaster.

I agree this is such an important and interesting thread, thanks for starting it OP. But the person who needs to read it most of all is Keir Starmer. I hope he does.

The biggest eye opener for me was noticing so called charities that are in fact lobby groups whose main function is to keep themselves afloat. They generate research that is not research, just collection of individual opinion. I no longer trust research I read about in the media and have to find the source before I'll accept it. It is shameful so many organisations are so disingenuous. I have also come to the conclusion that public money should go to public institutions where there can be better accountability, not to charities.

@EndlessTea Thank you for linking to that video about grooming gangs. I really didn't understand the reach or the power of the gangs, or the sheer level of violence, from what I'd read in the press I'd dismissed it as mainly about vulnerable girls making poor decisions and men taking advantage of that. And there was an element of that but this video shows so much more. And then the denial and fear of facing the issue from the police, and the political fallout and denial from intersectional feminists. Wow.

I guess I am learning how complicated this is and how careful we have to be about accepting political ideologies wholesale and especially from elsewhere like the US. And how divisive this is among women. There might not be the same structure of grooming gangs as such but black girls can be exploited or just disappear and I don't know if it's changed but from my youth I do remember a kind of racist "oh well what can you expect" attitude to it.

I guess I don't see it so much as "what else have I been wrong about" as "what else have I been burying my head in the sand about".

I guess I don't see it so much as "what else have I been wrong about" as "what else have I been burying my head in the sand about".

Yes and for me, “what have I been assuming that those in authority would at least be trying to do the right thing about”.

I think maybe it takes getting older to really see that a lot of problems don’t get solved, they just go round and round through various initiatives and varieties of lip service about how to fix them, while someone somewhere benefits from things staying as they are. Generally that someone is men, rich people and those in power.

@OldGardinia That is a really interesting question about male/ female attitudes. I think that may be part of it but it is also a generational thing and a workplace/ institutional thing. In my old workplace, we were all late 40s and over and most of the men were dads of adult kids and some were even granddads. I think they came at it from a perspective of - what if that were my daughter/ son, what would drive them to it, how would I feel. Also key was the workplace environment. We had lots of fantastic and sometimes heated discussions about work and wider issues. We weren't afraid of disagreement and it didn't impact on our respect or regard for each other.
On to the new place. It is a large organisation and is signed up to Stonewall. I now have lots of colleagues in their 20s and 30s many of whom use pronouns in their signatures to state the obvious. Interestingly the most vocal person I can think of about supporting trans rights is a younger female colleague. Other people are mostly absolutely silent. I have heard some slight dissent from an older male gay colleague but it was so slight it was ambiguous what he was saying though I was willing him to keep going and was ready to jump in in support. A lot of the pro trans/ be an ally stuff filters down from senior management. I feel that I can't speak openly and I am by nature a very forthright person. I have made small attempts to open the discussion and I will get bolder and hopefully others around me will too.

YouSirNeighMmmm
You have expressed what I think beautifully. I would add to the identarian left those who believe in child-centred education which is skills-based and works by indirect learning (e.g. teaching reading using whole word methods rather than phonics - and this is the left that wants the phonics check abolished and balanced literacy taught). These ideas massively disadvantage the already disadvantaged who do not have parents/family with the time/money and education to rectify the disasters that ensue.
Yours is a beautifully exact answer to why many of us have problems with e.g. Labour.