Billy Bragg getting challenged in the Observer

[GrimbutGerbil]

By a male journalist…

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/apr/28/billy-bragg-interview-progressive-patriot?CMP=twt_a-music_b-gdnmusic

@OldManLogan and others

100%, bad actors both state sponsored and otherwise will both inflame tensions around social change and seek to instigate new divisions.

Neither do the views they are pushing need to align with their own aims as long as they destalise opponents. I have no doubt Russian state sanctioned disruptors are simultaneously:

Pushing the narrative of corrupt Western society using sex education and popular media to normalise degenerate sexualities and threaten the traditional family in Russia and in forner Soviet Block countries where Russia wants the population on side.

Pushing extreme /purist views and fear of the other side to both sides of the gender debate in Western Europe, North America and Australia to weaken the states and alliances it perceives as enemies/threats by making us face inwards and be suspicious of each other.

Have you read the book, Logan, or just this review? www.rs21.org.uk/2021/10/26/review-anti-gender-politics-in-the-populist-moment/

I ask because the review opens with, and refers to multiple times, trans rights - which the book barely does.

And this phrase is pretty much identical to what you posted: "These ideas originate from, and are promoted by, networks of powerful people in the West."

This feels a bit like when TRAs cite that Simone De Beauvoir quote.

State actors are only responding to movements already bubbling in the collective psyche. Issues and movements all have "their time".

Certainly responding, but not only responding IMO.

Occam's razor - if you were a shadowy disruptor and you thought up a new idea you reckoned would catch the collective psyche and fly, why wouldn't you do that?

Frankly if it were me I'd have a load of generative/combative AI bots generating and testing out ideas all the time and a report that give me 3 ideas to review every day.

Think of it like new trend/product ideas... yes there are businesses waiting to catch and monetise emerging trends but there are also businesses who try and create the trend.

A synergy, then. Trends themselves emerge from the collective - whoever channels them.

I've read it all. Set me an exam paper on it if you like and I'll even provide a bibliography and referencing. Give me a week though, I'm quite busy.

I think Douglas Adams summed it up rather well: "Michael usually referred to his mother as an old battle axe, but if she was fairly to be compared to a battleaxe it would only be to an exquisitely crafted, beautifully balanced battleaxe, with an elegant minimum of fine engraving which stopped just short of its gleaming razored edge. One swipe from such an instrument and you wouldn’t even know you’d been hit until you tried to look at your watch a bit later and discovered that your arm wasn’t on."

Such a wonderful quote from a master wordsmith. I love to think that DA would have been on the side of truth and justice in this debate, but I just don't know. So many left-ish, sceptical men have turned out to be utter disappointments on this issue.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

This! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

🤣

No! Women don’t need Russia or anyone else to tell us that men are not women and that we are not safe sharing our spaces with them and that destroying children’s bodies with puberty blockers and amputations is wrong. GTF with patting us on the head and telling us to “calm down dear, it’s all in your silly little head, put there by Russia” Talk about condescending ffs. The pushback is a grassroots movement of women mightily pissed off with seeing our kids messed up and being colonised by men and then told sit down and not talk back.

Respectfully, I think you've missed my point.

God, he really is thick isn't he? Really , really thick.

Poster who said this, got it right, 'All thats proved is that he's always followed a crowd and not the argument.'

Sorry, I’m very tired today, that should have been directed at the original poster. I can see your point and I think that’s true to an extent as it’s plain that Putin is pointing at the shit show that is the gender ideology war and asking the Russian people if that’s what they want for their own kids. It a gift to him, one that he exploits but absolutely did not create. As for the “purist” view, if the trans stuff hadn’t captured and divided society and if it wasn’t hell bent on indoctrinating the next generation, then same sex attraction wouldn’t be getting lumped in and demonised with it in the way that it is.

and for some reason he is proud of it