Film of protest outside the Lesbian Project meeting

[DameMaud]

This needs to be shared far and wide!
Made by a YouTube auditor who had no idea what the protest was about and was shocked by the protesters and police.
Think he has just peaked a few thousand more people ( read the comments!)

Maybe they don’t like Oddysee? The video embedded same as YouTube one.

It’s a brilliant documentary.

God ChatGPT talks bollocks on the issue of women’s rights.

I'm going to write an AI machine that mansplains everything - I'll call it ChapGPT.

<Gets coat, leaves>

It’s been approved!

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4775891-a-record-of-our-dissent-short-documentary-film-on-oddysee

Just wanted to throw in my two cents wrt the YouTuber who recorded the protest in Bloomsbury. I note he dedicates his channel to provoking confrontations with police officers and other members of the public. My personal view, having watched the video a couple of times now, is he clearly agitated the protesters quite a bit that day.

The behaviour of the trans activists, without any kind of external provocation, speaks for itself and is newsworthy enough. I personally don't think we need the assistance of someone who artificially manufactures drama for a living. It's unethical, and I wouldn't want to throw any support behind them.

Now that he's got a taste for it, I suspect he might try milking this issue some more. I've been left a bit traumatised watching other videos of him standing in front of police officers telling them to "shut up" twenty times in a row like some out-of-control egomaniac. That's not what the pushback against the trans lobby is supposed to be about. It needs to remain a thoroughly sane voice of reason in a world going mad.

He’s not pushing back against the trans lobby though, his interest is the police.

Just linking up this thread I posted yesterday.

It’s an American documentary about the NYC Let Women Speak event (the one Posie couldn’t get through the crowd to attend) and it clearly shows many of the same tactics we see here.

It’s a really excellent film made from assembled news footage, the women’s own recordings and it’s all put together via an interview conversation with the main organisers.

It ends with Karen Davis’ singing
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4775891-a-record-of-our-dissent-short-documentary-film-on-oddysee?reply=125104209

I think these ‘auditors’ are a bit like Noah building the Arc. Same for those blokes going to Speakers’ Corner religiously to defend free speech.

They seem like obsessed weirdos who other people take the piss out of, but when the flood comes, we think “thank fuck for the weirdos” - already prepared and rehearsed.

True, but on that day he didn't just interact with the police, he interacted with the protesters as well. It's one thing to 'audit' the police who are trained to deal with difficult and uncomfortable situations, but a whole other matter subjecting ordinary members of the public to those tactics. Let the activists hang themselves by their own rope, eg. NZ, Hyde Park, etc.

I'm not so sure. I suspect a number of these 'auditors' may have criminal records. The way they deal with police officers (there's a deep underlying animosity there) and the fact they are getting detained and arrested on film, which is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Anyway, from what I've seen, it all looks a bit too unethical for my tastes.

Of course - people who have, or feel they have, been unfairly treated by the police are the most likely people to develop a keen interest on insisting the police act with fairness and trying to catch them out when they don’t!

There is a rich seam for auditors to mine at TRA protests. Doesn’t mean we are all in the same gang or have anything much in common, it just means that police don’t follow their proper code when they are policing TRAs, and the auditors can make hay out of that.

If something good can come out of it, like keeping the police on their toes, then that could be a real result. The image of that group of police officers in Hyde Park walking away from the swarm of activists...

But there's also another side to that coin as well, where officers just trying to get on with their jobs are being intruded upon by 'auditors' with their cameras in sensitive locations looking for some juicy footage for their YT channel. It's mostly the latter that actually gets uploaded online.

I did not Get the impression that he antagonised the trans-mob.
He said I’m on your side, and then did not like being blocked by placards, being pushed or having his phone knocked out of his hand.
He was more confrontational with the police, for sure, towards the end when he says to the inspector that he was not dismissed was ott in my view.

He really came to this from a different angle-auditing the police in public.
I like that he had no skin in the game whatsoever, and the mob peaked him all by themselves just by behaving appallingly.

It is too late to say he might damage the cause. The cause is already branded fascist, nazist, racist and boring even.

And the cause is simply to retain basic human rights for women!

Absolutely.

However ‘auditing’ only works if the auditor is rigorous in always staying on the right side of the law.
Police hate auditors (no one likes a smart arse following them about at work, do they? 😆) and would happily arrest them, so the auditor has to give no reason for the arrest. An outstanding warrant would evaporate an auditors entire operation so even if auditors do have police records, they are likely to be spent convictions. Basically if they HAVE committed a crime, they’ll have already done their time (paid the fine, finished community service, whatever) otherwise hanging around and annoying coppers would (rightly!) get them picked up on outstanding warrants/probation breaches etc.

I posted a load of background inc actual police documents warning about auditors back near the beginning of the thread.

Auditors aren’t terves and there is no point in terves fearing being forced teamed with auditors when we are already being force teamed with Nazis and Fascists.

No one with half a brain could call auditors fascists when they are clearly anti the concept of an overzealous police state that infringes on the civil liberties of ordinary citizens.

I expect some Auditors are Freeman of the Land Weirdos and some are Environmental Hippy Weirdos who have been arrested for laying down in front of bulldozers or letting animals out of labs and some are Old School Lefty Weirdos who demonstrated against the Poll Tax and the Iraq War and supported the Miners Strikes and some are Weirdos leftover from the illegal party scene of the 80s and 90s, Veterans of the Battle of the Bean Field and Squat Party Survivors etc.

I also imagine some will be Fathers 4 Justice type Weirdos who imagine themselves oppressed by social workers but those ones are unlikely to want to do anything that even slightly helps a bunch of mostly lefty wimms and thus likely won’t show up at a Let Women Speak event unless hell freezes over, not even for TikTok views!

There are a LOT of reasons why a person might’ve developed an intense like of coppers over the last 3 decades or so.

Fuck knows women have a lot of reasons to feel the same way, we just tend to have less free time and be less up for police confrontation than chaps, hence female auditors not really being a thing (yet! All the women who have been arrested for mean tweets might be auditors in a decade’s time).

I'd view him and his ilk as just another random variable, that can only be of benefit to shedding light on the madness.

If this fellow comes across poor police behaviour at, eg a 15 minute city demo, he may lose all interest in our cause.

Hopefully not.

Personally, I did get the impression he antagonised the activists. I remember the first person who approached him, she didn't ask him to stop filming as such, she asked him to essentially stop circling around the group with his camera the way that he was. Later there were comments from the police officers about the way he was walking around and pacing up and down the street, which he was actually doing for a really long time if you look at the time stamp of the video and consider also that there were a number of cuts in the footage.

There were other people filming that day as well. You can see a number of people with their phones filming the protest. But the sense of unease was only being generated as a result of the 'auditor' and his filming. As I say, this is what they do. They say they're carrying out a public service. I'm not so sure that's all they're doing.

Finally got round to watching the GL interview, and one of the things that stuck out to me was TLA telling how The Righteous were feverishly amplifying a lie that one of them had dreamt up (something about him muttering Far Right things as he walked around filming, and something about him being a member of an extremist Far Right group). He's getting a glimpse into the kind of insane pious fraud slurs that naughty women have had to endure for years.

In that context, it's funny (not sure whether I find it funny:peculiar or funny:ha-ha) to see that some posters are concerned about the cause being associated with the naughty man.

What group of people "on the right side of history" would not be proud to be visible making history?

What group of people "on the right side of history" would be so minded as to run three layers of anonymity... masks/balaclavas, umbrellas, and outsize pieces of cardboard?

You'd welcome the guy over to show yourself to the world as a fearless freedom fighter.

Surely?

No?

I've seen too many videos now of this particular 'auditor'. All I see for the most part are perfectly decent officers just trying to do their jobs and having their time wasted by self-appointed vigilante members of the public purporting to be carrying out a public service. Apparently, the USA is starting to crack down on this sort of activity, but it seems like as usual it's managed to spread to the UK as well.

Personally, I did get the impression he antagonised the activists. I remember the first person who approached him, she didn't ask him to stop filming as such, she asked him to essentially stop circling around the group with his camera the way that he was.

he was perfectly within his rights to walk around the streets filming and that woman had no business approaching him.

what if he’d asked the “activists” to clear off and stop dancing around and making noise in the street!

the fact this group were there in the first place was to agitate simply because a group of lesbian women were having a meeting which was nothing to do with them

Anyway, I've said my piece. He said he'll do some other protests in the future, so I suspect this may not be the last we see of him.

He's within his rights, but you can't deny it would put people ill at ease. Other members of the public who were filming weren't behaving like that. And don't forget, this is a sensitive subject, everyone's tense and on guard, even the activists. I've got a number of non-activist trans folks in my Twitter feed. I can't agree with pretty much any of what they say, but one thing that's very clear is just how paranoid and scared they seem to be. The protesters obviously thought he was some far-right bloke up to no good.

I actually agree that he seems a bit of a mardy shit-stirrer.

But for example when the protestors asked him not to film, he replied something to the effect of "No expectation of privacy in a public place" and AFAIK that is indeed the law (feel free to correct me). So however much they disliked being filmed by a non-approved passerby of insufficient purity and dubious manners, they were in the wrong and he was correct. Particularly as they were deliberately making a huge show about the whole thing, what on earth did they expect?

Yep, shit-stirrer is definitely what I've call him.

Agreed, they were definitely in the wrong.

The protesters obviously thought he was some far-right bloke up to no good.

But they asked him, and he talked to them and he explicitly stated he is left of centre politically.

Now, they did not like being filmed. In a public street, blocking the road, HARASSING a meeting in one of the buildings.
That is what they were doing!
They were harassing women having a meeting in a closed space! By being a nuisance in the entire street outside that building!

So no, TLA was not in the wrong here.

I haven’t watched any of his other videos. Maybe he is a right annoying arse.

But his beef was not originally with the protesters and they took it upon themselves to intimidate him anyway. Not on.

Whether he’s left or right wing is of no relevance anyway, and he didn’t need to answer that question.