Monday, July 29, 2013
Femi-absurdism over banknotes and Jane Austen
So Jane Austen on a banknote is some sort of victory?! Come again? Aside from (1) the fact that the Bank of England had long decided this, (2) that there is an image of a female, and in the most prominent position possible, on fully 100% of banknotes, and (3) no confirmed image of Jane Austen survives: if Jane Austen is the biggest female achiever then the whole idea of women achievers is in very serious trouble.
Fay Weldon describes Austen as literary Mills & Boon: female erotica couched in polite upper-middle-class 18th century discourse. Great literature it is not. The total myopia of contemporary feminism is revealed in that anyone could even begin to consider Austen as any sort of proto-feminist, with her stories that are nothing but nubile upper-middle or upper-class beauties and high-status absurdly rich males seeking each other for marriage – this set in moral concrete with the not-quite-absurdly-rich-enough male suitor turning out to be a bounder in comparison to the very richest catch of all (as best exemplified in the Darcy/Wickham story within Pride & Prejudice).
The real issue re illustrating individual great achievers concerns neglected males. In the wake of Charles Darwin's image – removed in favour of Austen's – what we really need is an image of the co-author of the theory of natural selection (the greatest idea in all history): Alfred Russel Wallace. He beats hands-down a pulp-fiction author of the equivalent of lads-mags or pornography.
As for the usual sort of extreme nastiness on Twitter (which feminists themselves are particularly adept at persistently dishing out): why would anyone interested in any remotely erudite conversation have anything to do with a medium that sets such a risibly low character limit that little but the most ignorant, ill-considered trolling ever appears on it? Of course a silly extreme-feminist head-banger gets fool Twitter posts that purport to threaten rape, because that's what everyone knows is the best way possible to seriously wind her up; fitting as it does with feminist totalitarian malicious ideology of 'rape-crisis'. It doesn't signify misogyny [sic] even in those individuals actually making the spurious threats: they were not attacking womanhood; they were attacking femascist craziness. The real problem, perennially, is not 'misogyny' [sic], which is mere feminist invention, but misandry – the systematic, prejudiced contempt and hatred for males, which is deep in our biology and ineradicable from any culture; in contrast to the consideration always afforded to thereby over-privileged females.
So where in the media has there been any balance at all to present an alternative view as here? Not one contra voice anywhere allowed near a microphone. Certainly not on the BBC, when Naga Munchetty, the co-presenter of Breakfast, yesterday ended an interview lacking anyone to provide any balance with the words "I agree". R.I.P. BBC news journalism – if it ever was of any standard.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
The wrongs done to Stuart Hall
There is now much more than just my commentary challenging the PC-fascist extreme-feminist witch-hunting obscenity re the likes of Savile and Hall; quite a bit of it on the Spiked! site, which has been particularly and persistently good on this topic. Barbara Hewson, the London barrister I've pointed to previously as being a particularly incisive observer of the bullshit from a vantage point inside the legal system, argues uncannily on similar lines to the arguments I have been making myself, so I will let her make the points for me, here in her piece just published on Spiked! .....
"Former TV presenter Stuart Hall's sentence for a number of indecent assaults was doubled from 15 months to 30 months by the Court of Appeal. Public pressure to increase Hall's sentence stems from a number of misguided ideas, which seem to have filtered into official thinking.
The first is that we can, and ought to, judge past crime by present standards. This is not legally possible. Hall had to be sentenced by the law as it was framed at the time of the offences, which took place between 1967 and 1985. To sentence fairly, it would be necessary to dig out old law textbooks and newspaper cuttings, to get a sense of how these matters would have been treated decades ago.
Had Hall been charged contemporaneously with the matters since complained of, the prosecuting counsel, defence barrister and judges would all be men who very likely would have fought in the Second World War. As such, they would have had a considerably more measured view of human depravity. They would have found the extravagant emotionalism with which Hall has been denounced not just distasteful, but unbalanced.
Hall is not a serial rapist, and there was no suggestion that he used violence or a weapon. The sentencing judge called the acts under consideration 'relatively mild'. His last offence was over 25 years ago. There was really no proper basis for imprisoning Hall in the first place. As such, doubling his term is as unprincipled as it is indefensible. What is going on?
This leads on to the second problematic idea underpinning Hall's sentencing: the present approach to sex offences is dominated by a pre-modern, pre-scientific attitude, which regards offenders as monsters. This is in stark contrast to the more enlightened outlook evolved during the twentieth century, which regarded criminals as people who could be treated, cured and rehabilitated. But the feminist campaign in the 1980s around violence against women and the sexual abuse of children adopted the idea of the offender as 'predator', a metaphor drawn from sensationalist crime novels. A predator is an animal like a wolf, which kills and eats smaller animals. This has passed into official terminology. Judges, policemen and prosecutors now repeat it mechanically, as though it were literally true.
In January 1993, a crime-fiction writer and child-protection attorney named Andrew Vachss wrote an article for the New York Times, balefully entitled 'Sex Predators Can't be Saved'. Unbelievably, he said this: 'Chronic sexual predators have crossed an osmotic membrane. They can't step back to the other side - our side. And they don't want to. If we don't kill or release them, we have but one choice: call them monsters and isolate them.'
As the eminent criminologist Professor Philip Jenkins has noted, the use of such misleading language ultimately derives from supernatural conceptions of deviance as 'evil'. As such, it has ominous consequences for the way our law and society operate. He observes: 'The influence of "predator" terminology on recent legal thought is truly remarkable - about as amazing, in fact, as if a modern US Congress passed a law against vampires, ghouls or bogeymen. The underlying goals may be worthy, but the intellectual framework is beneath contempt.'
The lurid and emotive terminology deployed by present-day victims and their advocates also derives from this fictional/supernatural axis. Even relatively mild acts are said to be traumatogenic, engendering years of torment for Hall's victims, according to Channel 4 News. Jenkins writes: 'As with any religion, survivorship implies a total world-view impervious to disproof or even challenge by conventional standards of evidence or rationality.'
So indecent assaults are transmogrified into heinousness, and the ageing Hall must be caged some more. But what about really serious present-day assaults, such as rape or gang-rape? The perhaps unintended message that we are also giving modern victims of these crimes is that they should expect a living hell as a result of their experiences. This miserabilist and anti-human leitmotif is hardly going to help them."
The first is that we can, and ought to, judge past crime by present standards. This is not legally possible. Hall had to be sentenced by the law as it was framed at the time of the offences, which took place between 1967 and 1985. To sentence fairly, it would be necessary to dig out old law textbooks and newspaper cuttings, to get a sense of how these matters would have been treated decades ago.
Had Hall been charged contemporaneously with the matters since complained of, the prosecuting counsel, defence barrister and judges would all be men who very likely would have fought in the Second World War. As such, they would have had a considerably more measured view of human depravity. They would have found the extravagant emotionalism with which Hall has been denounced not just distasteful, but unbalanced.
Hall is not a serial rapist, and there was no suggestion that he used violence or a weapon. The sentencing judge called the acts under consideration 'relatively mild'. His last offence was over 25 years ago. There was really no proper basis for imprisoning Hall in the first place. As such, doubling his term is as unprincipled as it is indefensible. What is going on?
This leads on to the second problematic idea underpinning Hall's sentencing: the present approach to sex offences is dominated by a pre-modern, pre-scientific attitude, which regards offenders as monsters. This is in stark contrast to the more enlightened outlook evolved during the twentieth century, which regarded criminals as people who could be treated, cured and rehabilitated. But the feminist campaign in the 1980s around violence against women and the sexual abuse of children adopted the idea of the offender as 'predator', a metaphor drawn from sensationalist crime novels. A predator is an animal like a wolf, which kills and eats smaller animals. This has passed into official terminology. Judges, policemen and prosecutors now repeat it mechanically, as though it were literally true.
In January 1993, a crime-fiction writer and child-protection attorney named Andrew Vachss wrote an article for the New York Times, balefully entitled 'Sex Predators Can't be Saved'. Unbelievably, he said this: 'Chronic sexual predators have crossed an osmotic membrane. They can't step back to the other side - our side. And they don't want to. If we don't kill or release them, we have but one choice: call them monsters and isolate them.'
As the eminent criminologist Professor Philip Jenkins has noted, the use of such misleading language ultimately derives from supernatural conceptions of deviance as 'evil'. As such, it has ominous consequences for the way our law and society operate. He observes: 'The influence of "predator" terminology on recent legal thought is truly remarkable - about as amazing, in fact, as if a modern US Congress passed a law against vampires, ghouls or bogeymen. The underlying goals may be worthy, but the intellectual framework is beneath contempt.'
The lurid and emotive terminology deployed by present-day victims and their advocates also derives from this fictional/supernatural axis. Even relatively mild acts are said to be traumatogenic, engendering years of torment for Hall's victims, according to Channel 4 News. Jenkins writes: 'As with any religion, survivorship implies a total world-view impervious to disproof or even challenge by conventional standards of evidence or rationality.'
So indecent assaults are transmogrified into heinousness, and the ageing Hall must be caged some more. But what about really serious present-day assaults, such as rape or gang-rape? The perhaps unintended message that we are also giving modern victims of these crimes is that they should expect a living hell as a result of their experiences. This miserabilist and anti-human leitmotif is hardly going to help them."
Saturday, July 13, 2013
The UK immigration system declared 'unfixable' – by the Home Office itself ... and, by the way, there's yet another hidden backlog; of a further 200,000 cases.
Well get this. "Is it ever going to be fixed? … I don't think so": so says the new DG of UK Visas & Immigration, Sarah Rapson, as highlighted in the very latest excoriation – in a long line of such reports – of the UK immigration system by the Home Affairs Select Committee, published today. Surely this is the most astonishing admission anybody's ever made in UK government. If Sarah Rapson thinks her task is hopeless, then why on earth did she accept the appointment; and why on earth was she offered it?! Similar can be said of the Home Office Permanent Secretary, Mark Sedwell, who is criticised in the report for his inappropriate 'business-as-usual' memo to staff after the recent reorganisation to reverse the move to agency status and bring the Borders & Immigration Agency back into the Home Office itself.
As I've long pointed out, central to Home Office culture is the conviction that immigration is somehow an impossible problem. This is related to the fact that the Home Office is the prime locus within UK government of the political religion of PC – the new and virulent fascism. This has nothing to do with consideration for supposed disadvantaged groups, but the fraudulent manufacture of notions of 'identity-politics' groupings to be treated as being privileged over the mass of people lumped together as stereotypical 'workers' of old: men, essentially; 'white' men more specifically. It's sheer elitist-separatism, but elitist-separatism in denial pretending to be egalitarianism, and of a particularly noxious kind. This obscene ingrained attitude itself drives the Home Office's incompetence – regarding migrants (conceptualised as more worthy than UK citizens, and therefore to be preferentially supported) as well as women (likewise conceptualised as more worthy than men and similarly to be preferentially supported) -- and vice-versa in a vicious positive feedback loop.
The bottomless pit of ineptitude and lying that is the Home Office is plumbed still lower today with the publication of the Select Committee's report, containing as it does not just Sarah Rapson's startling admission, but the revelation of yet another hitherto undisclosed backlog category; this one containing 190,000 cases! This takes the total of cases currently in all of the various once-hidden backlogs to more than 500,000!
It also turns out that only out-of-country visas processing is anything like good practice, and that the Home office will have to second out-of-country staff to show those working in-country how to do their job. And this has only just been realised?
Well, it took Channel4 almost a decade to fully realise that visa processing is completely hopeless in the UK: they sent in an under-cover team to pose as caseworkers in the very place where I used to work, in Sheffield. The very sort of astonishing goings-on I revealed back in 2004 when I famously 'whistle-blew' were caught on hidden camera in the flippant pronouncements in meetings by hapless managers.
The Home Affairs Select Committee rightly is not letting go of the Home Office on the immigration issue, but when is it going to tackle it over the virulent fraudulent analyses misrepresenting crime statistics, and what the researcher Belinda Brookes-Gordon dubs "the feminist-separatist cabal" within the Home Office? Nothing coming out of the Home Office (not to mention Keir Starmer's stupid mouth) is remotely believable when it comes to anything regarding men-women; notably in respect of rape and domestic violence.
Monday, July 08, 2013
Remarks about Bartoli's success in women's tennis are not ill made
John Inverdale's musings on Marion Bartoli's relative lack of 'looks' likely driving her success in winning the Wimbledon women's tennis championship actually are quite well made.
The basis of personal success in life is profoundly and invariably different according to sex. For men, the way to attract a partner to match your desires is to compete with other men for status, which is the way that males advertise their complement of 'good genes', which is what females are seeking in a male. For females, the name of the game is entirely different. With the fundamental basis of the biology of being female to be all about choosing male 'good genes' to then pass on to the next generation, then the criteria whereby a woman's attractiveness is judged is according not to 'good genes' but fertility (youth/beauty).
Either sex can of course choose to ape the other, but men wouldn't get very far if they choose to exchange intra-sexual competition and flaunt themselves as if they possess a womb! Women correspondingly don't become more sexually attractive if they exchange sitting on reception for climbing the workplace greasy pole to make company executive. However, if she does choose this route, then a woman can at least place herself in the paths of the sort of high-status males she's seeking. Unfortunately, the time it takes to achieve this means she will be older than the young model-like females for which the fellow executive are themselves on the look-out. So she will compound her less than optimal looks with her increasing age. A further problem is that the male high-flyers she encounters will tend not to form a relationship with one of their female colleagues, because of the perceived scope for extra-pair sex such females have with other executives. In consequence, she's left somewhat high and dry.
Nonetheless, plain-Jane types such as Marion Bartoli – if, that is, you agree with John Inverdale that she is indeed so plain, and instead is not devoid of an element of beauty – surely stand to make some gain from putting themselves in the limelight rather than to sulk in a garret! It's not a motivation to rival that of men's for climbing hierarchies of success, whether they be in commerce or sport; which is why the pinnacle of any area of achievement is predominantly a male habitat.
There is no use our current extreme-feminist-cobbled culture in denying what everyone full knows are key realities of life, because there is nothing even the most draconian 'thought-crime' legislation and other absurdities can ever do to change this even one iota.
Remarks such as John Inverdale's about Marion Bartoli are not insensitive but genuinely insightful, and any power they lack is through how obvious and ubiquitous they are.
