Julie Burchill - Radcliffe and Watson as Goneril and Regan to JK Rowling's Lear ...

[JFDIYOLO]

Love this article by Julie in the Spectator

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/jk-rowling-and-the-cass-report-reckoning/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3VvJYQd2vwgO9mAurMSE0BZjxIMxWQU8mcLWYYDpUyEQec3S6KinnU66w_aem_ATs81FV-gaKZmtlbXykM39GcxSBlP4P6bBxbd3K870CCnkpp6tLvtwfR_T6KIJQjHjv6O2rXnTT2apWy3hX9ikxP

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_fourfm

BBC sounds just covered the role of the BBC and the media in the gender ideology debate. Very interesting piece with a journalist from the BMJ discussing how difficult it was to cover the whole trans story.

Love it. Her and JKR have tongues like whips 😆

For those who cant acess the article via the link in OP luckily someone archived it a couple of days ago - so read at https://archive.ph/5D0Ko

Agree its a good read, and I would love to agree that the walls are beginning to tumble.

Unfortunately I think there are many individuals and institutions will not give way. Partly because they couldn't accept having to publicly admit they got it wrong.

Have the misogynistic/complicit-three apologised to JKR or tried to backtrack on the bullock they have spouted over the years yet?

Entertainingly written.

Privilege calls to privilege and it’s no coincidence that so few working-class people – as with the climate change racket – are numbered among the trans-mob. Radcliffe and Watson are part of the creeping colonisation of the once-lively arts by the dreary spawn of the bourgeoisie.

JB may be introducing nuance with a reference to "trans-mob" as high-profile allies rather than transgender people but there are frequent expressions of concern that a disproportionate number of looked-after children are caught up in this modern tragedy. I should think most of those children are categorised as working-class origins or somewhere in the undesirable deciles of multiple indices of deprivation.

https://data.cdrc.ac.uk/dataset/index-multiple-deprivation-imd

Matt Goodwin describes the rise of the "epistemic class" that shapes the prevailing culture, conversation, politics, arts, policy in a way that means all that they survey is familiar to them but unrecognisable to others outside that group. This overlaps with Rob Henderson's observations about luxury beliefs for which the harms accrue to others, and not those that espouse them.

For much of the last half century, the new elite, whose families often descend from the professional and managerial classes, benefitted far more than others…
Shaped by their privileged family backgrounds, their educational qualifications, and their much greater ‘cultural capital’…the new elite hoovered up most of the gains from Britain’s embrace of hyper-globalisation and a political economy which was rebuilt around them, which both demanded and rewarded their skills.
They’ve benefitted culturally, too. After flooding into the creative, cultural, knowledge and public sector institutions, becoming a new “epistemic class” which creates, filters and determines what is or what is not acceptable or desirable within the national conversation, the new elite watched the prevailing culture be completely reshaped around their far more socially liberal values, tastes, political priorities, and interests.
Increasingly, when they’ve looked out at the institutions and what they create -the television programmes, films, adverts, books, museums, galleries, columns, and the national conversation more broadly- they’ve seen their worldview staring back at them while millions of others struggle to recognise their worldview at all.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/rise-of-the-new-elite

Apologies for continuing the derail. Personally I believe human activity since the Industrial Revolution must be making a huge impact on climate - how can it not? But, peer-reviewed journals are not what they once were (and not just for climatology) and this article gave me pause for thought on what decides which papers are published and which are not, and what 'tweaks' have to be made in order for them to be published.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/06/global-warming-climate-change-scientist-unrealistic-nature/

https://archive.ph/7TpDs

Yes they remind me of these lines from Judy Grahn's The Common Women Poems - Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80:
She keeps her mind the way men
keep a knife—keen to strip the game
down to her size.

I used to love Judy Grahn, still love her poems but I think she's gone kind of TWAW...

@Runor I would like to see your evidence that a small indebted country in Northern Europe can make any difference whatsover to the climate (whilst spending trillions and bankrupting ouselves). Extremely arrogant to think we can and we just seem to have outsourced our carbon by getting everything made in China and shipping it back to us which is even MORE carbon intensive. But yes derailing Julie.

Northernnature, I didn’t say we could, I was objecting to your suggestion that climate change was just part of the natural climate cycle - if you look at the data, it very clearly is not.

Data is not always reliable, as the outcome of studies are often slanted in favour of those who fund them.

Great article. I just hope the whole trans-led destruction of women's rights around the world starts to crumble soon. No sign of that happening in Australia yet, alas.

JB may be introducing nuance with a reference to "trans-mob" as high-profile allies rather than transgender people but there are frequent expressions of concern that a disproportionate number of looked-after children are caught up in this modern tragedy.

@RethinkingLife she’s definitely aware of this and covers just this issue in one of the recent free episodes of The Lesbian Podcast. Possibly the episode that covers Cass, but I might be wrong on that.

For the Great Trans Con has been bust as wide open as the space between India Willoughby’s ears.

Willoughy, yes. Complete twat.

But The Great Trans Con is a wonderfully descriptive, relief inducing, oh so scathing, reprimand of a comment.

She's a brilliant writer.

Indeed. The oil industry funded studies and smeared academics for years, which is exactly why it is taking the world so long to wake up to what we are doing to the climate…

Interestingly, that technique had previously been used to support the tobacco industry.

I enjoyed the article, but I fear that the celebration for the end of the grat trans con is premature. Cass is a waystation, not the end.

Every single sentence is a quotable classic. Love, love, love Burchill.

It applies to all studies, not just the ones you want to discredit I’m afraid. The days of “trusting the science” are long gone. That also applies to the scientists, they are just as open to corruption, group think and self interest as anyone else unfortunately.

In my science student days I was always taught to check my calculations and results for plausibility. If they didn’t seem plausible, they needed double checking. Plausibility is not the last word - they may seem implausible and still be correct, or plausible and be incorrect. Science is most convincing when it predicts something that seems unlikely but actually happens, repeatedly. We need to keep in mind that good science is repeatable, unlike say Cold Fusion, and that coming to the same result via two different experiments is better than one. Not all science is the same. In Physics, some areas are really well evidenced and some areas are much more speculative.

When it comes to logic and ideology, it’s even easier to persuade ourselves that we are right.

Dineasair, I teach climate science as part of my job. I’ve never encountered genuine, informed climate denial IRL, can you tell me where you get your information from please? I’m truly interested to hear how you can have come to such a different conclusion than I have?

I’m assuming you don’t believe either the temperature measures, ice sheet measures or the Keeling measure of CO2 in the atmosphere data are falsified? So are you suggesting the increase in CO2 isn’t due to human activity, or that CO2 concentrations aren’t causing increasing temperatures?

I’m not a scientist, I was talking in general. There have been repeated scandals involving scientific studies where the data was skewed in favour of vested interests. Thalidomide, tobacco, Project 226 which blamed fat for heart disease and was funded by a sugar consortium, and not least, the numerous flawed studies into puberty blockers. There are, in fact, scientists who disagree with the climate hypothesis, and who challenge the motives of some of those pushing that agenda.
The “climate crisis” is now big business and I do not believe that creates an atmosphere of impartiality. None of that even takes account of the fact that the UK is responsible for a tiny fraction of global emissions, taking the UK to zero emissions will be a drop in the ocean, and will make very little difference to the overall outcome when countries like China and India are pumping out vast amounts. It will however, cause massive hardship and disruption for our own population. This country would be far better concentrating on areas where we can make a massive difference, if only to our own local environment. Industrial trawlers wrecking the seabed, industrial agriculture, the use of plastics in everything, the throwaway consumer culture we have adopted from America, lack of an affordable, integrated system of transport for goods and people. These are the things we should be focusing on, where we can make a huge difference, not net zero.

Of course you’re right, not all science is of the highest quality, not all journals work as hard as they should to validate the work they are publishing. Everyone is subject to a degree of bias. Nevertheless, there are things about which we can be more certain than others.

You say again that there are scientists who disagree with the climate ‘hypothesis’. Do you mean scientists who disagree that the climate is changing, and that human activity is directly responsible? Can you name them please, because I am not aware? If you mean scientists who disagree about the best response, then that is more understandable.

My experience is that most people are surprisingly unaware of the damage climate change is causing - loss of land to flooding, especially as sea levels rise, the impact on food supplies, increasing levels of migration as other countries become unliveable, and the largely unknown impacts of (known) changes in the ocean currents. None of this is dependent on opinions, because it is all already measurable.

I agree that the UK’s net zero target is more about signalling than impact (although our CO2 emissions per head are still vastly higher than India). Of course, net zero would would also reduce our dependence on imported oil and gas, which probably has some political appeal. I agree that there are better ways to spend the money - all the points you make are valid, along with improving our resilience eg via home insulation and flood alleviation. However we choose to respond, simply pretending that climate change isn’t happening is, unfortunately, very likely to lead to the hardship and disruption you (and we all) are so keen to avoid.

Although she is dismissive of JKR's pro Labour and anti Brexit stance. Had to get a dig in somewhere.

My concern is that in the virtue signalling responses like Net Zero, the UK makes life unbearable for the majority of the population without even making a dent in global emissions. The UK is tiny compared to countries like China and India, whose emissions are growing rapidly, these countries have massive populations compared to us. We are so focused on Net Zero and making little effort on things that would really make a difference here. The UK has just agreed to fund a massive plastic manufacturing operation which is crazy considering the damage plastic causes and the fact that it will be here forever, why isn’t anyone glueing themselves to the road over that? Even if we took Britain back to the Stone Age it would make little difference to the overall outcome.

Thanks for sharing, great article.