Yasmin Alibhai-Brown "Most rape is commited by men men"

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Andrew Doyle explaining what the Supreme Court ruling means for women's rights. Yamin Alibhai - Brown stating that most rape is commited by "men men and not trans men".

I'm absolutely disgusted that women are still coming out and defending men.

Sorry, different people prefer different terms and I was never going to get it right for all. My in-laws refer to their children as having autism rather than being autistic.

It's something I've mostly come across on social media re honesty equalling being right so tbf it could be coming from people who actually aren't autistic.

I did say broadly in favour and used the term social justice as woke is even less clearly defined

That's what I mean. It's such a naïve argument.

If you create a cohort purely by them saying some words out loud, and give some access to women and children, guessing what will happen shouldn't be difficult for any woman over the age of 15.

OK. I mean I still don't see how anyone can be broadly or narrowly or any other kind of 'in favour' of something that doesn't mean anything.

I would argue that 'woke' has a more clearly defined meaning because we know it's etymology. It's a term which originated in African American deep south communities to mean that one's eyes are now open to structural and systemic racism in the USA. What that means for middle class white people in Hampstead, say, I don't know. But at least the concept 'woke' has a history which can be uncovered.

'Social justice' on the other hand...as far as I've been able to discover, its earliest proponents used the phrase as a euphemism for 'install a socialist/communist government, by force if necessary'. That's how proto bolshevik thinkers used it at the start of C20 and it seems to also be the case for neomarxist thinkers like Ibram X Kendi. And I mean, even that is specious, because the USSR was a lot of things, but 'socially just' was certainly not one of them.

For other people, the execrable Owen Jones for example, 'social justice' simply seems to mean 'all the people I like get nice things and all the people I don't like lose their jobs and get cancelled.' And presumably your definition (which you've not given) falls somewhere in between these two polarities.

In general though I think we as a people need to try to shake off our addiction to these catch-all, thought terminating phrases. Because 'social justice' might mean something very lovely and benign. Alternatively it might mean something dark, anti-democratic and inhumane. But if trans activism has taught me anything, it's: don't passively accept nice-sounding but ill-defined phrases ("protect trans kids!" for example actually means "medicate vulnerable children into disability"). Because if they're not properly defined, then how the hell do you know what you're agreeing to?

Social justice is a term that applies to a large number of different ideas about how society should be organized to ensure equality for people, not all of which and in agreement with each other. Just as criminal justice covers a broad range of ideas, many of which are contentious even amoung (especially amoung) people who are engaged with it. That doesn’t mean it’s incoherent.

You can be broadly in favour of social justice meaning you think people should generally be equally entitled to the benefits of society, have an equal say in it and be treated equally (something that used to be a controversial, roundly ridiculed idea) without agreeing with every action that anyone ever suggests in the name of furthering that aim.

This 😂It seems like she's unable to speak without raising her voice.

I thought she was going to leave because of Brexit? And then because she couldn’t stay when Boris was in No 10? Has she returned to grace us with her presence now? Or was it all just…..rubbish.

All rape is committed by "men men", a category which includes trans women.

HTH.

OK, but even then I have questions.

equality for people - in respect of what? Do you think, for example, that a brain surgeon should earn an equal salary to a postman (my eldest's a postman, it's a hard and important job, but a brain surgeon is worth more to society imho)? That an undergraduate who gets 97% on their final exam should be awarded an equal degree to the undergraduate who scored 40%?

have an equal say in it and be treated equally What does this mean? That I, a humble PR woman, should have an equal say in the blueprints of the reconstruction of the Severn Bridge as a qualified and experienced civil engineer? That you should have an equal say in the maintenance of Trident as one of our most experienced generals (I'm presuming you're not a general btw; apologies if you are.)?

generally be equally entitled to the benefits of society What does this mean? Does it mean that a millionaire pensioner, with a vast and lucrative property empire, should be entitled to the same benefits as an impoverished single old lady without a bean to her name? Does it mean that a woman at the peak of her legal career with vast personal savings, on finding herself temporarily between lucrative jobs, is entitled to the same benefits as a severely physically disabled young man who needs 24/7 care and has no realistic prospects of ever working? Does it mean that all vulnerably housed people get immediate access to the same type of house - a four bed in Surrey perhaps - whether they're a large family of traumatised asylum seekers or a single man?

How do you propose that this equality would work in practice? How does our declining workforce pay for it? Who administers it, and how do we stop them from becoming fantastically corrupt, as happened in the USSR? And more importantly, is it fair (people often confuse 'fairness' and 'justice', imho; they are very different things, but both have a vital but different place in a democratic society)?

What you've described as something you 'broadly' support (why only broadly? Which bits don't you like? And if you discard some bits, can you really be said to support 'equality' at all?) is the quickest way to total societal collapse, imho.

Or do you just mean equality before the law, and equality at the ballot box? Well, we already have those things. In fact, we were one of the first countries in the world to enshrine those things, a fact of which we are right to be proud.

The way you are trying to pick holes in it in as a phrase doesn’t really make sense to me. Most of your questions are the ones that people who are interested in social justice struggle with. It’s not a single set of normative ideas.

To use an analogy I would say that social justice is similar to criminal justice. You can disagree on what should or shouldn’t be criminal, whether a criminal justice system should punish, rehabilitate, or prevent, how you best achieve which ever goals you decide on, etc. lots of different opinions, many directly opposing each other, but still covered by the broad term criminal justice. It’s something you can be in favour of broadly without agreeing with every suggestion someone else who is broadly in favour of it makes (in fact you can’t agree with every suggestion as many are at odds with each other). Or you could be against criminal justice generally, maybe seeing it as ineffective and pointless, or an unfair way to control others, or at direct odds with freedom/your religion/something else, etc.

I think there is a clear difference, because criminal always refers to wrong doing, and we do have a criminal justice system.

‘Social justice’ just means fairness in society and that is much more vague - who doesn’t want fairness? I’m sure every political party would say that they do.

Exactly - like we can all agree to end bullying and harassment. Until we discover that people hold completely different meanings for those words and suddenly they’re pointed at me/you?!

In relation to transgender people, some have come to believe that referring to their biological sex in any context is harassment. Which just can’t be true or reasonable. But for 10-15 years it’s been enough to see NHS staff or patients disciplined or have treatment withdrawn or denial of rape. There are enough examples of the problems now so that a more reasonable balance will be reached. Eventually. But to get there we will need to agree a shared vocabulary and definitions. Vague concepts and lack of detail is exactly what has caused problems. As a detail person i don’t see the need for specifics as picking holes in things. For me it’s essential clarity

I'm sure every party says they're committed to fairness now, because our public discourse has made it somewhat taboo to outright state that you are favouring one set of people over others. But neither side really live that up to goal. There was a time, some of it not that long ago, when politicians could quite bluntly say that of course men should get X and women shouldn't, or that our priority was white people, or Protestants, that poor people deserved their lot, etc. There used to be wide support within political parties for treating various classes of people as better than others and being open about it.

Well thanks to this post I forked out £25 at the local bookshop today on Andrew Doyle’s book. So far so good - he’s got a great way of putting ideas into words. That by his definition that woke - including the trans movement- is “the politics of illiberalism”

ETA he states that the book is a defence of liberal values, a critique of intolerance and a reproach to those who use the snowflake slur.

Andrew talks a lot more in-depth about his book here.

Quite a lot of it went over my head, but for anyone interested, it's informative.

Plus, he's a pleasure to listen to even if he's reciting a shopping list.

I don't think that's quite right as an analogy tbh, because the criminal justice system in England and Wales is really well codified, there's masses of case law, precedent, books and research and empirical evidence going back centuries. It's empirically described and practised. 'Social justice' is not.

You say I'm 'picking holes'. Given that 'social justice' was explicitly used as a justification for 'defunding' police departments across the United States (leading to a precipitate rise in violent crime of which vulnerable African American communities were principally victim, in Chicago for example) and also explicitly used as a justification for providing cross sex hormones and puberty blockers to mentally ill teens (leading to medically caused disabilities and countless harms), I would actually suggest that the problem isn't that I'm 'picking holes' in social justice as a philosophy.

Given that 'social justice' has been used as a justification for making real world policy changes that have hurt vulnerable people, I'd argue that we as a collective haven't been picking holes in 'social justice' enough.

I’m comparing social justice to criminal justice as an area of interest, not simply about the way countries have tackled some of the issues within it. Criminal justice <> the criminal justice system that we have comprising of laws, police, courts, etc.

You’ve gone back to contending that social justice means a particular way of solving social problems where as I keep maintaining that something like “defund the police” may come under the banner of social justice, but so does “give the police more money”. Social justice isn’t a lable for a particular policy, it’s a lable for what those policies are intended to do. That they often don’t even do what their proponents want them to is totally normal and typical in every part of policy making.

As with social justice, criminal justice is used to justify all sorts of practices that many later (often also at the time) consider to be failures, And it’s also typical for the goal of what constitutes justice in criminal justice policies to be contentious and for the prevailing ideas to change over time.

I’m not against picking holes in social justice policies or the goals of groups agitating for change under the broad banner of social justice at all, I think that;s hugely important. I’m saying you dismissing it as a term that is broadly applicable to many areas of politics is unreasonable.

You’ve gone back to contending that social justice means a particular way of solving social problems where as I keep maintaining that something like “defund the police” may come under the banner of social justice, but so does “give the police more money”.

I don't think that's true. I believe 'social justice' is a euphemism for a specific political ideology which is socialist/communist, prison abolitionist, neo-marxist Progressive. Therefore it could not mean 'give the police more money'.

I have reached this conclusion from my efforts to find an aetiology and history of the concept 'social justice' through my own wide reading. I commenced this project during the height of the BLM protests because I was concerned that livelihoods were being destroyed and small businesses looted whilst there were calls on the Left of the Democratic party to defund the police. This led to the 'stand down' policy ordered to the NYPD during the 2020 looting of Lexington Avenue (in which a brave security guard lost his life).

As 'defund the police' and 'social justice' were by then being bandied about by UK politicians and thinkers of the Left, I became concerned that the UK could also see drastic changes in state-approved approaches to crime on the basis of an ideology that had not been tested at the ballot box, nor by democratic debate in Parliament. I felt that this could only be detrimental to the lives of the poor and vulnerable, so I felt it was important to test my instincts empirically in so far as my limited intellect would allow.

In the course of my research I found that Lenin uses the term in his seminal work 'What is to be done?' as a sort of rallying cry - the communist revolution in his mind would achieve 'social justice' which he identified as identical to 'social equity' that is total economic and social equity of wealth and outcomes. It is used the same way by Stalin-approved Soviet philosophers such as Bochenski.

When we get to the 1960s, French academia, we start to see the emergence of postmodernist influence in the invention of deconstructionist and neomarxist theories. And of course we start to see these theories applied not just to economic theory but to identity, racial and gender theory in the Berkeley School, really kicking off here in the 1990s.

Thus by the time we get to the 2020s we see the graduates of the Berkeley 'school of thought' in US Government and public life (e.g. AOC, Ibram X Kendi, Butler, Crenshaw) and their acolytes in the media calling for 'social justice' and 'equity', and if you examine their writings and social media posts, you will clearly see that these are euphemisms (so as not to frighten the public, presumably) for a communist/socialist regime to replace liberal democratic capitalism in the US.

I have never yet seen 'social justice' and 'equity' employed by anyone in support of socially conservative ideologies such as 'give the police more money'.

I think our conversation is extremely instructive and am keen to continue it, either on this thread or PM, if it's getting irritated to others. Because the very fact that we're debating what 'social justice' means, when it was used as the ideological basis for defunding police departments (leading to a horrible rise in homicides in Southside Chicago and other places) and medicalising children, shows how fundamentally anti-democratic the attempt to impose 'social justice' by fiat actually was. And, worse, those seeking to impose it would not be honest about what it's a euphemism for!

We as thinking democratic citizens should never let such a poisonous ideology encroach on public life again. At least not without articulating in public exactly what it is, in a democratic arena.

@MarieDeGournay Indeed, she is a clown. My DB worked with one of thegrown up children of one of the poor men convicted ( and eventually released years later )of the Birmingham bombings . A very nice person too but they told my brother of what a horrific childhood they had. How they had to move when people found out who the family were etc and everyone thinking your dad had killed all these people and he hadn't and their dad is still massively affected by it mentally. Very sad . This person still only told very few people who they were and were good friends with my brother (still keep in touch)as some folk still believe those men had something to do with it even though, they were cleared!

I also find it interesting, but am struggling to find the time to respond well as I find it takes a fair amount of thought to craft a reply. Which I haven’t found time for today. So I hope you don’t find me dismissive to just respond briefly to one part right now. I just don’t have the time to get into it more thoroughly.

I agree conservative activism and the right don’t tend to use the term “social justice”. But they do work in that space. As an example of a conservative approach to social justice I present an essay from the Heritage Foundation that addresses this point: https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/conservatives-do-believe-social-justice-heres-what-our-vision-looks

Obviously the Heritage Foundation promotes a fairly particular conservative perspective that many other conservatives (especially in the UK) do not fully subscribe to. I’m not suggesting this is the conservative version of social justice, just one different perspective on it.

Thank you. I think all that article really suggests is that right wingers have started to try to co-opt the phrase 'social justice' to its own side. But I don't think that affects or changes my contentions in this thread, which are that:

1. 'Social justice' and its oft-allied companion phase 'progressivism' are far left concepts which originated in the Bolshevik Communist movement, and in fact become more common in the mature USSR under Stalin (e.g. the famous WW2 dictum "Our comrades will be happy to fight for a country which places social justice and progressivist values above all else" - which was false, because millions of them had to be pressed into service at the barrel of a gun, but it was repeated ad infinitum by all media)
2. 'Social justice' was used in the 2020s as the theoretical basis for a number of major policy changes which were NOT tested at the ballot box and were deleterious to public health and safety e.g. de-funding the police;
3. This was seriously anti-democratic, because 'social justice' as an ideology was used to make significant changes, but the CONCEPT was never explained to the public adequately, it being, I argue, a euphemism for far left progressivism
4. That makes it unlike other ideologies on which our society is based, such as capitalism, which is broadly understood and can be defended as an ideology with reference to history and can also be tested at the ballot box.
5. As such it was both anti-democratic and disingenuous.

Very happy to continue our conversation! :-)