New Zealand’s totalitarian mentality – Bruce Logan :
The British philosopher Roger Scruton has claimed, “the first move the totalitarian mentality makes is to stop free-minded, open scholarship in pursuit of truth”.
Right now in New Zealand a totalitarian mentality in thrall to hate speech legislation is looking like the architect of bondage. Hate speech legislation is the tribal designer’s major tool as the diversity, inclusion and equity trinity (DIE) becomes Aotearoa’s civil religion; a religion that demands submission; mind first, body second. Hate speech legislation is necessary to punish the blasphemy of unbelief.
“Free-minded open scholarship” is not possible in the “decolonialising Aotearoa” because freedom is grounded in the existence of permanent and objective truth ordering the material world. DIE, instinctively suspicious of scientific method with its concept of falsifiability, would rewrite history to ideological fashion.
The difference between “free-minded open scholarship” and “the totalitarian mentality” images the difference between child and adult. The child insists that the world should accommodate his or her desire. A wise adult knows better. For example, the free minded rational scholar believes everyone profits by learning to adapt to an ordered world.
The totalitarian mentality, like a petulant child, depends entirely on the authority of the subjective (my feelings) for its supremacy. It must always be able to adjust truth to pursue its own ends. Indeed the ends will justify the means. The cult of fluid sexual identity is the most pervasive contemporary example.
That’s why cancelling the dissenter is essential. Convinced of its own self-righteousness DIE must permit no criticism. To do so would be to admit that the authority of its submission to subjectivism is flawed. DIE’s house of cards would be exposed as a parody of itself. The rest of us would see, what we already suspect but are not allowed to say, that it is a description of a fantasy that, in order to survive, must be imposed by the state on all citizens.
So civil religion preaches its own irrefutable strategically positioned doctrine of cultural pluralism, that creator of “designer tribalism”. The redeemed believe that their salvation will be found in the cultural medication of DIE. It has its own indoctrinating priesthood of bureaucrats, dissent is the unforgivable sin. Even if an unbeliever confesses his or her trespasses atonement must yield to the totalitarian’s pleasure.
The civil religion is aptly labelled DIE because that’s exactly what it will bring about; a seedy kind of justice and the accelerating decay of democracy: an end to freedom of religious expression and speech. The demand for hate speech legislation is nourished by the self-righteous politics of politicised identity. Poisoned by subjectivism it must be protected by the bureau of increasing regulation.
The faithful believer embraces regulation; indeed, it is regulation that shapes public morality and the new social order demanded by the civil religion; the church of cultural relativism and the state in cahoots.
The demand for hate speech legislation camouflages the true nature of “social justice”, that uniform state redistributor of society’s advantages and disadvantages; about getting people what the state says they should have and not about anyone getting what he or she might deserve.
Hate speech legislation is social justice’s camouflaged bullet-proof vest. It hides under the canopy of the “common good”. Aristotle might have known what that is but in a decaying civilisation seduced by the poison of subjectivism who decides what the common good might be. Certainly not the common man or common woman.
Ultimately the common good must collapse into total state control. Having lost the conviction of a shared permanent and transcendent public truth vital to social harmony the “common good” can only be achieved by faithfully practising the religion of DIE. Ironically DIE’s fulfilment of individual desire and reinforcement of its fantasies, will be snowed under by the onset of an everlasting totalitarian winter.
‘Liberal’ thought police echo Salem witch trials – Hadley Freeman :
. . . Sometimes an accusation is so ludicrous that addressing it feels like trying to hold an eel in your hands: the harder you grip, the more it slips from your grasp and entwines around your body until you fall on your face. The hardest crime to disprove is a thoughtcrime, as George Orwell called it, and it’s striking how many women have been accused of it over the past half-dozen years, always about gender. In Channel 4’s upcoming documentary Gender Wars, the feminist academic Kathleen Stock is repeatedly accused of hating trans people, endangering trans people and doubting trans people’s right to exist, and her denials merely confirm her guilt in the eyes of her detractors. “Being in the same room as Dr Stock and hearing her say the things she says, when I know the meaning she has behind them, it just feels aggressive against me,” one Cambridge student says. Even if you say the right words, they know you’re thinking the wrong thoughts.
If you’ve quietly longed to stick it to women for years, especially middle-aged ones, then this has been a boom time for you. I’ve watched so-called liberal men chinstroke over which women should be allowed to speak in public. JK Rowling? Certainly not. The Scottish politician Joanna Cherry? Best not. One author friend was dropped by her agent not for anything she’d actually written but because of a general sense that she might have thought wrong thoughts about the gender argument. A manager at a publishing house tweeted last week that people in the book industry will be “called out” just for following “GC people” — gender-critical people, aka those who understand there are two biological sexes. In 2020 more than 300 Guardian employees signed a letter complaining about a “pattern of publishing transphobic content”. The letter didn’t specify what that content was, but a strikingly well-briefed Buzzfeed article said it was “in response to a column by Suzanne Moore” that had argued for the protection of women’s rights. What, precisely, in this column was transphobic was not specified. Just make the vague accusation and let it settle like a stink. Soon after that, Moore left the paper.
Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible is 70 years old this year, and it’s devastating how prescient it still feels, even though it is set 330 years ago during the Salem witch trials, the ultimate tale of women and thoughtcrime. The play was a parable about America’s then most recent foray into prosecuting thoughtcrime, McCarthyism, when anyone suspected of communism was damned. One character says that “witchcraft is . . . an invisible crime, is it not? . . . Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself, granted? Therefore we must rely on her victims — and they do testify, the children certainly do testify.”
The children will keep testifying. Let us hope more adults can do what the EHRC did last week: find the backbone to stand up to them.
The silencing and vilification of women and girls – Edie Wyatt :
The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem has issued a statement voicing concerns about the silencing and vilification of women and girls who are attempting to engage in debate about the human rights of women and girls.
Ms Alsalem said that ‘women and girls who emphasise the specific needs of women born female and who call for and engage in discussions around the definitions of sex gender and gender identity and the interaction of rights’ should be able to ‘express themselves and their concerns on these issues in safety and in dignity’.
It shouldn’t be an astounding statement, but it is, and at a time when the Australian government is ramping up censorship toward the very people Reem Alsalem is refereeing to, gender-critical activists. . .
Reem Alsalem said that she is concerned about the reprisals women face for speaking on this issue such as ‘censorship, legal harassment, loss of jobs, loss of income, removal from social media platforms, speaking engagements and the refusal to publish research conclusions and articles’. I now know dozens of women in Australia who have faced these kinds of reprisals because they refuse to yield the factual definition of sex.
Women like Jasmine speak up because they can’t turn from what they see. In the world of breastfeeding, the inclusion of gender identity ideology in women’s support infrastructure, is leading to the assumption that male people can produce milk suitable for an infant, and these males should be supported in the pursuit of feeding an infant from their body by the entirety of the medical profession, including birth and lactation specialists. Apart from the coercion that is required to implement such a practice, the process by which endocrinologists are getting human males to exude a substance from their nipples, seems to be ethically debased and scientifically unsupported. . .
When I raised this issue on Twitter recently, a trans activist posted a study in response, as an argument for the support of men ‘chest-feeding’. It was called Case Report: Induced Lactation in a Transgender Woman and it involved experimentation on an adopted human infant.
Isidora Sanger, who is a medical doctor and author of Born in the Right Body, says that the study is not only unethical but ‘fraught with incomplete and misleading information, disingenuous analysis and undeclared conflict of interest’. In what could be a warning to health professionals in Australia, Sanger said the study is ‘an example of how transgender health clinics prioritise emotional needs of trans-identified males over the welfare of women and children’.
If what the women are saying in the censored tweets is true, endocrinologists could be conducting unaccountable experiments on human infants in this country, and there is not a news outlet in the nation that would cover this using actual words that mean what they say.
The smoke and mirrors of ‘inclusive’, ‘queer’, and ‘diversity’, mask an unpalatable tale of misogyny and abuse of power that is told only when we are permitted to use words with correct meanings. The reality is that gender identity cannot survive without linguistic subterfuge and the broadscale censorship of women declaring their bodily needs and political interests. . .
After being in this fight a few years, I can report that trans activists are some of the meanest, nastiest individuals I have ever encountered in my life, and no woman would pick a fight with them without serious consideration. The most aggressive of the activists, stripped of identity signifiers, are mostly straight white men.
We are facing a failure of democracy and a corruption of liberalism and a time when we have a chronic dearth of liberals. The recent problems with John Pesutto and the Victorian Liberals show just how quickly the testicles of the Australian Liberal man will shrink back into his body when he is threatened. It has become obvious that some Victorian Liberals are fleeing for safety in appeasement to gender identity ideology in the face of aggressive state power, or what we used to call tyranny. . .
I hear political commentators regularly citing ‘the trans issue’ as a fringe or minor issue, but if the state can re-define the sex of our body, the role of a mother, and the purpose of a baby, and we are not permitted to critique that, we have already yielded essential liberties. Liberties that we need to politically organise and bring our requests to the state that we fund, to the liberal democratic state that is supposed to be accountable to the people, including women people.
Baroness Falkner is right to stand up to gender ideology – Joan Smith :
Exposing a lie sometimes has dramatic consequences. For years we’ve been told there’s no conflict between women’s rights and the demands of trans activists. If that were really the case, no one could possibly object to putting the word “biological” in front of “sex” in equality legislation, could they?
Nothing could be further from the truth, as the head of the UK’s equal rights watchdog, Kishwer, Baroness Falkner, has discovered. She has endured weeks of abuse since the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) wrote to the Government, proposing consideration of a technical amendment to the Equality Act 2010 to make it clear that sex means biological sex.
Since then, all hell has broken loose. Falkner has been called a ‘“Nazi”, a particularly vicious slur given that her husband is German. She’s been attacked by a slew of Labour MPs, who’ve made the baseless accusation that she’s trying to take “rights and protections” away from trans people. Now it’s emerged that a group of employees at the EHRC has compiled a dossier of complaints against her, including “transphobia” and harassment. Falkner is said to be “heartbroken” about the allegations, which her supporters describe as a witch-hunt, but she’s standing her ground. . .
The organisation’s role in balancing the rights of various groups is evidently not understood by gender extremists, who appear to think their demands should have priority over everyone else’s.
The attempt to oust Falkner shows how much is at stake. When trans activists claimed they weren’t trying to take anything away from women, they were telling an obvious untruth. Now everyone can see the reality for themselves, as convicted male sex offenders demand to be housed in women’s prisons and disabled women are called bigots for refusing intimate care from trans-identified males.
Adding the word “biological” to the Equality Act would achieve a very simple outcome, which is to confirm that the law means what we always thought it did. No one ever imagined, when the act was passed 13 years ago, that a group of women who share the protected characteristic of sex should include men who say their gender identity is female. If it did, it would mean the end of women-only spaces and services, which is why it is vital that the law should be clarified.
Another untruth is at risk of exposure here, however. Trans people in this country have the same rights as everyone else, which is right and proper. What activists are demanding is additional rights, which in this case compromises women’s rights to privacy and safety. And if the attack on Falkner shows anything, it’s the desperation of people with authoritarian views who fear they’re going to lose.
What’s happening is a nasty, personal campaign against any woman who advocates strengthening the legal protections women already have. . .
The tyranny of acceptance – Josephine Bartosch :
. . . The path between sexual abuse as a child and entering the sex industry as an adult is well trodden. Studies consistently show about three quarters of women in prostitution have been abused as girls and as many as a third were in local authority care. The same pattern is observable in the smaller group of men in the sex industry.
Robert was sexually abused as a boy, and as a young adult he was drawn into prostitution. He recalls that “being groomed can seem very empowering” because the child is the focus of adult attention. He adds “giving the victim a false sense of agency is part of the groomer’s toolkit”.
“It may set you into a way of thinking that sex is transactional, it removes the link between sex and love…. You become scared of seeing sex in the context of a loving relationship. It doesn’t make sense in that context. Again, this might not happen for everyone, but child sexual abuse and prostitution without doubt has contributed to this being the case for me.”
Reading Naqvi’s piece Robert reflects: “It’s interesting that the person at the centre of this article talks about pornography giving them a sense of power over men. But they [the male punters] are the ones who are gaining ephemeral and fleeting gratification, and the performer is losing something permanent.”
It should not take grisly “lived experience” such as Robert’s to illustrate the point that behind the magic words “agency” and “empowerment” lurks a bitter reality. Just as it’s easier to pretend women lie about male violence, it is ethically and socially cheaper to rebrand so-called “sex work” as a choice. And disturbingly, this seems to be part of a trend spanning academia and practice on the ground where behaviours like BDSM are increasingly being touted as a way for rape survivors to overcome trauma.
The group EBSWA (Evidence-Based Social Work Alliance) is clear that “People who are used in the sex trade are exploited, disempowered and objectified.” . . .
Questioning the choices of adults gives many people the moral “ick”. And it takes arrogance (guilty) and an unfashionable sense of morality to confidently tell a grown woman “no, what you are doing will hurt you more, and it will contribute to hurting others.” But this is not just about M’s story. It is about the creep of a new narrative that presents commercial sexual exploitation as a positive step in recovering from abuse and how BASW has colluded in this.
Previously, social workers were criticised for overlooking the pimps at school gates and around the care homes across England. Abusers were labelled boyfriends, the girls were understood to be exercising their agency. Judgment was reserved for those who dared to question whether the girls were equipped to consent. This approach was, and remains, easier than facing the true horror of the problem. But today, abusive men no longer need to wait outside for their prey. The pimp has been internalized as simply an expression of sexuality.
A porn-fed generation now struggles to understand mutuality and the emotional bond that sex can create. The result is not only the rebranding of abusive acts as love tokens, but also in the isolation felt by the men conditioned by pornography to see sex as an exercise in domination. It is in the entitlement of punters who believe that they can buy a sexual act. . . .
There is a place for judgment and stigma, and that place is not on people like M or Robert. It rests on the men who pay for a simulacrum of sex. The weight should also be felt by the social workers and indeed journalists who enable them. Over recent years there’s been a flurry of questionable stories about women making money on Only Fans, but these “heartwarming” tales are not ethically neutral, and it doesn’t take an expert in trauma to recognise that.
There is no triumph in M’s story. Perhaps the last words should be offered to Robert, who warns:
A time may come when your sexuality becomes something very precious to you, rather than a means to an end. And having given it away for money, you’ve said to yourself that it’s a commodity rather than a gift to share with someone you love and trust. That’s not to say that having sold it, you can’t give it again in a healthy way in the future. But shame, guilt, self-hatred…these are the emotions you’ll likely have to deal with. Or not. You can’t really tell.
Homepaddock 