Jane Clare Jones blog on Tommy Robinson

[CassieMaddox]

Just a really great read
https://janeclarejones.com/2024/07/28/tommy-robinson-far-right-populism-and-gender-criticism/

These are my favourite bits:

The greatest danger to women and girls has always been, and remains, the men inside their own houses. This is the nature, and the devastation, of endemic male sexual violence. It usually happens in the place, and with the people, who are supposed to be most safe. It would perhaps be comforting to imagine that we could easily identify the men who are dangerous – the Muslims, the brown ones, the ones in dresses – and then we could keep ourselves safe by keeping them out. But the argument materialist feminists made throughout the early years of the gender wars applies equally here: men are a statistical danger to women as a class and there is prima facie no way of working out which ones are dangerous and which ones are not.

The argument is no longer ‘guilt by association’ or ‘purity politics,’ it is now a) What even is the far right anyway?, b) The far right doesn’t mean anything because I was called far right for knowing men aren’t women, c) You people think anyone who disagrees with you is far right, and d) He is not far right anyway. That is, it has moved from claiming that association with the far right is either not happening or if it is happening has no impact on the substance of GC discourse, to people openly associating with the far right and recycling far right talking points while denying that the far right is the far right.

But what feminist women have tried, largely unsuccessfully, to get across, is that these kinds of men are not on ‘your side,’ if ‘your side’ is genuinely defending women’s rights. These men are on their side, and their side wants a largely white patriarchal nation, in which ‘their’ women know their place and are ‘protected’ only insofar as ‘protection’ means keeping them guarded from ‘other’ men.

The pictures at the end of the article are very illuminating too.

Brava JCJ 👏

Good point.
I'll shut up.

I'd recommend nobody engages further on this thread. They tend always to go the same way.

There is another more interesting and very active thread which is discussing the Olympic boxing event tomorrow which will pit a male boxer against a female boxer.......

Yes, I think this is probably generally accurate. There is a kind of interesting naturalism in this kind of thinking.

They believe that by stripping away the cultural and institutional past, they will get closer to a kind of naturalized, unbiased human being. And all of the evil that is contained within historical institutions and culture.

The natural human, in this view, will be good.

Badness comes entirely from these institutional and social overlays, which infect members of society.

It's very evident in that for radical leftists of this type - the revolutionary mode - the desire is to strip away all encultural to find pure humans. Whereas traditional conservatives see humans as by nature mixed in terms of desires and goals, etc, and culture and institutions as a way to try and control or manage those human frailties.

What's interesting though is you get people, as we see in the tread, who are a weird combination of the radical believers, but also want to use the state to control wong-think, and have in many cases a real lack of critical attitude to what that power given to the state could accomplish.

I guess it may be a less weird combo than I think though since it basically describes the Chinese and Russian revolutions and their political aftermath.

Me too! 😂

Maybe we should all make more use of the biscuit emoji. We certainly have cause to. I think a straw man emoji would be useful too.

I didn't say they were. I was asking pp why she thought "leftists" were? I haven't seen anyone pushing abolition of borders, that seems extremely hyperbolic.

I asked them to remove it after hearing this:
He told Times Radio: “We’d had all sorts of lies being spread and misinformation being spread about the alleged perpetrator and some people with the best of intentions then they tried to rebut this, they tried to argue back, but all that happens is you’re just amplifying people’s false messaging.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/31/southport-mp-condemns-rioters-as-victims-mother-calls-for-calm

Maybe they will leave it up, obviously when I posted it I had no idea we were about to have far right riots like last night's.

When people post about the piggybacking of far right men onto the GC movement on other threads they're derailing. When someone starts a dedicated thread it's derailed to 25 pages arguing we should be talking about other men, lamenting for post after post how they can't stand the OP, arguing about biscuits. Once again it's apparent that discussing the misogyny of far right men and their misuse of GC women's concerns is just not possible on this board. Yawn.

I simply repeated what you said.

There is the misuse of GC women's concerns by far right men as you say, but there are also some GC women who very clearly agree with everything else that the far right men say. As a quick dip into the cess pit of Twitter will demonstrate. Currently several relatively high profile GC women lauding the patriotism of the men who have gone to Southport to show their righteous anger/protect our girls/etc.

Personally I wouldn't amplify them, regardless of whether or not they say something I otherwise agree with. Although it seems unfashionable these days for women to have boundaries and red lines.

Found in my emojis (the list Mumsnet provides is always hard to access in my browser for some reason):

a nice straw hat 👒

and

a drinking straw 🧃

I like the hat best :-)

It's a pretty minority view on the fringes of the left & about as relevant as their other fringe views

Well short of one vile post about "patriotic men" nobody has been spreading misinformation on this thread have they? We haven't been discussing the perpetrator at all. So no need to delete, just deal with the post in question.

This thread has not been about Southport and I don't recall any posts about Southport. Are you introducing this now in order to goad people into discussing Southport and give you a pretext for asking Mumsnet to delete the thread?

I believe it was the OP who predictably introduced Southport into the thread this morning when they responded to @GenderBlender who I don't think was referring to Southport at all?

GenderBlender · 29/07/2024 17:43
I really hope to fuck I am wrong, but I have a horrible feeling that some of your posts are going to age very badly, very quickly **

The OP responded :
"What happened in Southport last night is a reason why none of us should be amplifying far right talking points. Or posting rubbish like this in the aftermath of a tragedy"

Somewhat ironic given that they're the OP desperate to pin far right alliances onto women on here.

Someone yesterday posted that "this thread wouldn't age well" earlier yesterday and there was a lot of discussion about Islam. The timing seems too coincidental now.

I'm surprised you've never seen anyone advocating for open borders. It's a fairly common leftist / social justice position to claim that you think open borders are a good idea. And even though these ideas do seem rather madcap I think they help to fuel the broader tendency of shutting down debate on immigration and calling anyone who advocates for controlled immigration policy as "xenophobic".

And it wouldn't be the first time that madcap ideas get taken seriously within the political establishment or other organisations and before you know it you have male boxers fighting against women in the Olympics

https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2024-06-11/open-borders-and-free-movement

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/open-borders-immigration/

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-case-for-open-borders

Ah well. That's probably because I'm not an SJW. I don't think its really a serious topic, seems like more forced polarisation.

I'm sure @GenderBlenderjust happened to post that just as there was breaking news about Southport and all the twitter racists were already spreading fake news that the attacker was Muslim. Maybe they can tell us what they were referring to instead @GenderBlender

No. You didn't. And it was out of order. It is completely unreasonable to quote snippets across unrelated threads and there is no good reason to do so at all. It's bullying. I'm not reporting so people can see it for what it is.

Well yes that's been clear for a while but lots of posters here used to play quite dumb as to being aware of any cross over between prominent GC women and the far right but would engage in discussion now this topic absolutely must be derailed.

Yes. Iirc that was just before the "debate" about immigration and Islam happened too.

hear hear. if i'm constantly told i need to deal with the bigot TRAs then why is it not universal? We should be calling out all disgusting behavior surely? especially when men such as Tommy Robinson and those who follow him don't have a good track record of being against all pedos or rapists, only the brown ones.

Yeah considering you repeatedly strawmanned on this very thread that anyone who cares about TR and the far rights misogyny doesn't care about Afghan women it would be a fitting response for you.

Well some posters has already thrown the Islam strawman into the ring already before being asked to get back on topic got too surreal.