That old "posh" British accent - why did we laugh at it?

When I was at university, I used to laugh with my friends at the Monty Python sketches ridiculing posh English accents and the army officers that used them. This was in the very early 90s. The Monty Python sketches were getting really old themselves, and the accents we were laughing at were fast dying out. 

One of my reasons for joining in this humour was less honourable. Being young I hankered after friendship. When I got to university I found a lot of my fellow students going in a political direction I knew I couldn't follow. Today we'd call it the "progressive" Left. But I found that when I played Graham Chapman's sergeant major character, some of those friends laughed very loud*. I didn't share the political bent that made them laugh at some things rather than others - but social pressure encouraged me to laugh at that parody

How we laughed at the posh-speaking army officers. Except that those officers were the ones that were actually in charge of one of the best militaries in the world, widely respected.

I've been thinking about this again when I watched a documentary about Britain's campaign in the Falklands. It is their sort who ran half the world. They were not much like today's breed of Englishmen: who all seem to hate each other, who are negative about themselves, everyone around them, the future, our past...negative about everything, really, which they seem to think is a badge of honour

* my student friends even seemed political at what they'd laugh at. Maybe that's true of some of the things those of us on the centre-right laugh at. But I do think that "progressives" took the phrase "the personal is the political" excessively seriously. A huge number of them were obsessive about their politics. It was hard to talk to them about any subject without them relating it to the struggle against the Tories. This cultist frame of mind is incredibly inimical to the imaginative life

Progressives, feminists, books and culture

It amused me to find a thread on mumsnet agonising about how someone's DS (dear son) was reading the BeastQuest books by the tonne (or having them read to him). She was upset that the main character was male & that the main female character didn't do as much. It was therefore, of course, "sexist"!

This is the feminist/progressive mindset: having got him reading at all, she then wanted to control what he read. It's not that there aren't books (Nancy Drew, but really thousands of them) with female lead characters, but that either a) he wasn't reading them, or b) they aren't always as popular; people's choices of reading are what are upsetting her. It must be upsetting for her that the Harry Potter is the main character in the bestsellers. It's the same mindset that had Dr Who disastrously turned into a woman, and will soon do the same for James Bond (which has already contained a rant or 2 against sexism from the new "M" who was at this stage, inevitably, a women). Firstly, they can't produce a franchise with a popular lead character themselves (Lara Croft, Mrs Marple etc are either not successful enough or "problematic in their representation of women") Secondly, they want to control all that we see, hear, say or think. They are, quite simply, mad...and they control the publishers & bookshops, schools, universities and the broadcast media. That's why you should be worried - your liberties are under attack

The childish tricks of the progressive left

Everything is racism

It seems to me that British (nay Western) life has become dominated by accusations of racism - often on the smallest pretext - to the point where discussion of politics becomes all but impossible, and therefore doesn't happen properly. Rulers in Europe are committed to mass immigration, and reportedly are considering whether to classify and dissent on the subject as "hate-speech". (this development is, in itself, a serious infringement of freedom of speech)

But whatever the ruling classes think they are doing we can't pretend that the obsession with racism is confined to them - it is rampant among well-off liberals living in London, Oxford and other university cities in Britain. I myself know well (and have written about) some of the types who keep the perpetual racism narrative alive. You'll be at a kids' party talking to other parents, or sipping cocktails in someone's spacious garden - often living in the whitest districts in Britain - and the conversation will veer towards "racism" as if attracted by a sort of black hole, from which nothing can ever escape.

There's a video on Youtube where a reformed SJW explains how she used to be actively looking for racism, almost hoping to see some so she could step in and be the hero. This is very common and illustrates the skewed perspective of such people. It's hard enough to understand life as it is, but you simply cannot see things clearly if you start out looking for a particular phenomenon, and ignoring everything else..

The trap being used to silence conservatives

We're bombarded with anti-white-male political correctness. I travel on my bus to work and I see posters advertising a 6th form college, that show several girls and a coloured boy. An advert for a martial arts class that has the same ratio - no white boys. I try to ignore this and open the newspaper that's free on the bus and by God it's Metro - the . At the weekend, I go to a nativity and open the carol booklet, and I see pictures of girls singing, with a boy in blurry focus very much in the background. And yesterday I watched Carols for Kings, once the glory of the BBC and one of the most powerful expressions of British spirituality you'll see still alive and well. But the powers tht be have screwed with this tradition, too. Most of the readers of lessons were women - the ratio was so blatant that they can only have been trying to make a pointl most readers had a north American accent, weirdly; there was one Muslim (naturally, at a Christian service...) and eventually I think one white male got to read a lesson.

The denizens of Twitter, as usual, paid scant attention to the beautiful music being played and got down to the serious business of pushing progressive politics. A user claimed to be disgusted with the whole thing - he didn't explain why - and people lined up to ask "Why?", "Please tell us why?". They'd made up their mind already.

That's the trap - we're having a particular agenda shovelled over us every day, and if you complain there are enough fanatics out there waiting to a) say how much they approve of it and b) are looking out for anyone who doesn't approve of it, so they can closely question that person and imply or just say outright that they are racist.

"Let's do something to wind up the Gammon brigade"

Sometimes the whole trap is quite deliberate. The Labour government who started mass immigration into the UK were open about their wish to rub conservatives' noses in it. They knew full well that they could not only secure votes, but accuse anyone who opposed the policy of racism. It was win-win for them. I'm certain the BBC do the same thing. When the new Dr Who was announced as a woman (what a joke that is, by the way, done purely for political reasons when there were already excellent Time Lady characters in the Rani and Romana) the usual Twitter crowd - aching to display some virtue, were circling like a pack of vultures waiting for someone to complain - simply so they could call that person a "misogynist". They gleefully announced how the best thing about this was that it "upset the Gammon brigade".

There is something wrong with us if our priority is to wind up someone from a group we want to accuse of hatred

They can keep this game up forever, and it is openly anti white-male - I don't think there is any controversial in my saying that. The discrimination against white, straight men,  flagrantly illegal though it is - is openly on view) The only antidote to it is for us all to call it out for what it is, unafraid of being accused of "hate-speech".

That and the fact that the opportunistic accusations of hatred are so reflexive, and often on such spurious grounds, that terms like "racism" will lose their power. This would weaken the grievance industry, but would hardly be a good thing in itself.

Is Free speech really in danger?

So it became half an issue when some students conspired to close down a debate on abortion in an Oxford college. All sorts of excruciatingly dishonest reasons were given as to why the debate should not happen - but one occasionally stated reason was that 2 men were debating the issue. Some feminists do not want men even expressing a view about abortion.

Anyways, one of the 2 men who were going to speak was Brendan O'Neill, and you can read his thoughts here - and also hear his discussion (I use the word loosely) with  the nightmare feminist from hell Harriet Brown, an Oxford post-grad who doesn't quite seem to have the knack of letting people talk uninterrupted for more than 5 seconds.

Ironically, one of the criticisms from student commenters was that free speech is actually no more than the freedom from government censorship or arrest for your views. So the shutting down of a debate wasn't a free-speech issue. This seemed worthy of some discussion, as it might sound at least plausible. 

So were a bunch of Spectator-reading, frothing-at-the-mouth right wingers getting upset over nothing?

No.

Oh, the long answer...OK

I think it's important to think of “free speech” more broadly than as just about government censorship. Schools etc could exercise censorship, so it doesn't seem a great step to think of student bodies doing so.

More complex is the social pressure we exert on each other: queues, good manners, etc. These are restrictions on freedoms - no freedom is absolute, after all - and are necessary to society. But they needn’t affect calm debate on ANY issue, even if a student announces the issue closed or "passe".

I think free speech is under attack, from those who want to ban words like "fat" & "bossy", from those who dreamt up "hate speech" laws … and from the feminists who try to stop men talking about abortion, by shouting them down (podcast above), by closing down debate, or by claiming:

"I'm not sure that men should be allowed to be part of the debate about anything that happens before a child could be potentially viable. While it remains as much a part of the woman as her liver or her hair"

or 

“The Pope’s beliefs about abortion will become relevant the day the Pope gets pregnant.”

or 

“The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups”

I pulled those quotes at random. The censoring attitude is common enough - I've seen it many times myself.

Free speech means..

...well many things, for example letting idiots say whatever they lie, no matter how stupid you or I find it. As said, total freedom is hard to come by in everyday life (on the internet you can come close) or we'd go quite mad. What I want is for anyone who wants to stifle debate to have to give a bloody good reason why it shouldn't happen, and not the cringingly mendacious pretexts given by those who have disgraced Oxford University's good name

Here's the reason: if we didn't take free speech seriously, there is a plentiful supply of young people in every generation who think they know better than us what we should be doing, saying, and thinking. They tend to get so impatient that the idea of shutting up dissenters occurs to them as a really good idea. Any restriction on free speech will be manipulated by such people for their political purposes.

We have to go through this every generation or 2 because we're too stupid to learn from our mistakes. I'd love if we could wise up and not repeat the process.

Yrs,
Angry from Middlewhere

Feminism's dishonesty - pt 1: Shirtstorm, or the day the earth went mad

The day and age we live in..

So, for those mysterious loons who don't get embroiled in internet furores, we'll start with the story of #shirtgate.

A team of scientists managed to land a space probe on a comet which was both hundreds of millions of miles away, and moving at 80,000 mph. That is quite a feat by any standards. I'd say even the moon-landings look tame by comparison. Something to make us feel good about ourselves, you might think.

Naturally there are press conferences surrounding this magnificent scientific achievement, and in one of these a prominent scientist from the project, Matt Taylor, was wearing a t-shirt with drawings of almost-but-not-quite-naked women.

...and this is where 21st century lunacy took over. These days we don't in reality have many facists, hardline communists (well a few, but not many Stalinists) or fundamentalist Christians (in the UK at least). We do have some rather fanatical Muslims, though. And we have feminism. Lot's and lot's of feminism.

That's so ostracizing!

The response to Taylor's shirt began in earnest, including angry tweets from Rose Eveleth of The Atlantic, and a piece in the Verge website entitled "I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing".

"Ostracising" is, I suppose, a gerundive, if I've remembered the term correctly, so it just about works grammatically, though it seems not to have flowed from the pen of a master wordsmith, if you ask me. This sort of language is also one of the tell-tale signs that you're reading one of the outraged victimhood-politics mob.

It's hard, isn't it, to see how a shirt can ostracise anyone. I'm not being funny here. This deliberate imprecision is sort of the topic for the day. For of course we are supposed to understand that they mean that the shirt is in some way related to behaviours that allegedly exclude women from working in science.

Let me quote from the Verge:

This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields. They see a guy like that on TV and they don't feel welcome. They see a poster of greased up women in a colleague's office and they know they aren't respected. They hear comments about "bitches" while out at a bar with fellow science students, and they decide to change majors

It goes on a bit like this. Now firstly calling the shirt "casual misogyny" is not just exaggeration, it represents the ravings of someone in need of urgent help. Some modern feminists will call depiction of the naked female form on a shirt "misogyny" if a man wears it, and beautiful self-expression if a woman wears such a thing. In truth, they imagine misogyny everywhere they look. All this seething hatred must trouble them (if they are really stupid enough to believe in it - which they might be)

Secondly, we are once again being asked to believe in mysterious forces at play that are stopping women from pursuing science. Now I've worked in a university Science department and seen no such forces - though they may exist elsewhere, I guess.

What I did see was many men in senior positions, but many more of the up-and-coming students and academics were women in this particular field. The point is, far from men conspiring to impede women's progress, they actually very often want to see more female colleagues.

The slightly more serious politics of it

But the debate about women in science has many similarities with the very dishonest debate about the gender pay-gap, and I propose to discuss this in my next post. Suffice it to say that many women, including some prominent feminists, have said the shirt doesn't bother them, and does not seem like sexism to them. Even Julie Bindel is concerned at what feminism "might become".

I'll end by requoting the Verge:

I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing

And ask - do these people care about anything other than their very dubious beliefs - that they hold with such religious zeal? The scientific and engineering achievement will go down in history. But some feminists didn't give this a second thought, because they were obsessing about an unspecified "sexism" that might not even exist.

They couldn't see the brilliance right in front of them, all they could see was something that wasn't there..

12 Varieties of modern British Bullshit - #3 - "Diversity"

This isn't authentically British bullshit. I apologise for claiming ownership of yet another stupid idea we saw fit to import from the States.

What can I possibly add to the debate about diversity?

Just this: the 'diversity' racket is nothing more than an attack on meritocracy. The principle is this: to not employ people on merit, but simply because they are not white British straight male. Any deviation from that template, the more the better, and you'll probably get the job.

It takes the most intellectually challenged of ninnyish nincompoops to not see that this is racial discrimination, also gender discrimination and, yes, discrimination based on sexuality. Every one of the things the political Left in Britain have lectured us about the evils of, all neatly packaged together in one word - and the Left cannot get enough of it.

Furthermore, I can't get over the tone of voice with which leftists deny this is true: the intellectual vanity of those who say "don't be ridiculous, you can't be racist towards whites" (#2 in our series), as if it were the most obvious thing under the sun. Or the vacuous claim that "underrepresentation" is sufficient reason to discriminate against me, and screw the consequences.

To conclude, the fight against discrimination has become just a ploy to bury the white man, It's number 3 on our chart. It's corrosive crap.

Celebrating an ex-PM's death? Really?

So the big story in the UK media today, it seems, is not Andy Murray winning the US Open (congratulations to him, btw) but the printing of T-shirts - for sale at the TUC conference - celebrating Lady Margaret Thatcher's anticipated demise. The messages on the T shirts include "Hey ho the witch is dead".

The story was most read on the BBC website for a while, and attracted over a 1000 comments in a few hours on the Telegraph website. But there's little more to say. It does, I suppose, look like more nastiness from the Left - the self-professed nice people in politics.

But what are we to make of the level of hatred and the standards of behaviour? Do we want to live in a country where it is acceptable to celebrate the death of another? It was bad enough when the tabloids crowed over Myra Hindley's passing - it is a hundred times worse in this case, to say this about someone who devoted her life to serving her country. Yes someone who made some mistakes - unlike the rest of us no doubt...

It is a sign of civilization to maintain the best standards of behaviour you can during political debate - the most divisive, passionate area of discussion there is. Those of us debating can get angry precisely because we become so involved in the issues. But the point is that we're arguing so we can attain a more civilized society (aren't we?) So if we can't behave like compassionate human beings then I would like to know what the point is of listening to fine words spoken by politicians, or indeed debating anything.

I imagine TUC leaders may get quite pompous over the course of the conference (will they condemn these Tshirts? Have the Labour party done so?) But I don't know what these fools, or any other bunch of fools, can do with a country full of people who think it's acceptable to celebrate the long, undignified death of another human being.

The BBC biased? Never!

For a good while now, there has been a debate in the UK about whether the BBC has a left-wing bias or not. Less of a debate, more a statement of fact followed by vehement denials. But still we have to roll out the arguments.

The BBC are supposed to be unstintingly impartial - that is their rasion d'etre. Yet on their news and cultural output they relentlessly either stifle, ridicule, or completely ignore anything other than a narrow 'progressive' viewpoint (of the Guardian/Independent newspapers) - which has very limited support in the country as a whole, but is given free (or license fee-funded) propaganda by the state broadcaster

The above view is an angry one - but it is supported by the facts. Every time I switch on radio 4, or watch a BBC news programme of any kind, the slant is obvious. There is no balance within the programmes themselves, as there should be, nor is there any hint of the news programmes being balanced by more libertarian programmes. If you think there is, please show me.

Last night, as an example, I switched on "Saturday review", on radio 4. This was hosted by the scrupulously impartial, on-the-fence Bidisha, whose previous quotes include:

“Any man who thinks it’s OK to live in a household where the woman does the overwhelming majority of all the housework, childcare and family admin is a woman-hater”,

and

 “I wouldn’t be above some impromptu castration”

Please note that my collection of notes below took no work whatsoever. I listened to the programme once only, scribbling a couple of notes as I went along probably missing much. 

• look at the chosen topics: Naomi Alderman's novel undermining Christianity, a left-wing protest album (at a time when the Democrats are in power in America). Bidisha talks of the TV drama showing an "Empire with victorian values, undergong forced changes and reversals of power"
• the guest Cahal Dallat states that the programme "has a good Tory in it, which I think is something worth watching" - this 'good Tory'  talks of a minimum wage  3 times the one "that socialists have brought in"*
• the idea of the "old world breaking up" is mentioned about 5 times in 5 minutes
• when talking about a sci-fi-based play by Aykbourn, Bidisha enthused "That android is everything a man should be"
• there were odd remarks about Jesus’ “socialist principles”
• Bidisha rather wanted the Ry Cooder album to be history-changing,
• one guest said it was “really good to see a grumpy lefty getting out there and doing protest music"

Those are just a few examples, but the general agreement was relentless. Where was the non-progressive viewpoint to balance all this? I'll answer that for you: nowhere, and it won't appear soon on the BBC.

Sometimes your Guardian reader will respond that these views are now standard UK opinion, whereas a cursory (or more in-depth) look at newspaper sales shows that exactly the opposite is the case. If you mention this, they will, without missing a beat, change tack, and claim that the alternative 'liberal' view (read "Marxist inspired Guardian view") should be given some air-time. Which is ok - but not ALL the air-time. But by now their attention will appear to have wandered.

They don't care what the rationale is, they just want the progressive viewpoint pushed by public funding whatever the reason given needs to be. It is therefore unbalanced political propaganda and no-one should pretend it is anything other than that.

* for a very eloquent man, Cahal Dallat overused the words "socialists" and "tory" a little - which may or may not reflect his framework thinking about the world

The Guardian on Shakespeare

I have a new post on GraunWatch.

A writer named Emer O'Toole has written a piece for the Guardian claiming that the plays of Shakespeare are little more than an tool of colonial/imperialist control over the world. As I tend to see Shakespeare's plays as having been very central to British culture for centuries, I take issue with her here.

As the owner of the blog says, this isn't necessarily the "Guardian line" on Shakespeare. But I believe this line of thinking is all too common, and needs to be subjected to strong critical analysis wherever possible. Too many people are getting away with some very woolly thinking.

The subject was also discussed on David Thompson's blog (in the comments section of this post). The point was made that education and thought in the UK is being influenced by a strong anti-patriotism - quite common, I think, in the pages of the Guardian and Independent, and in the output of the BBC.

The dishonesty of the left on racism

So I understand that in the BBC's ongoing fight against racism, they interviewed a lady (alas I don't have her name) on the radio, who gave a few opinions on the subject. Sadly, it seems that she rolled out the argument - completely discredited in my view - that 'racism' only exists within a particular power dynamic or relation. The idea is that black people cannot be guilty of racism by definition, because they have less power in UK society.

There are so many problems with this argument. Ask a white man being beaten up by several black men - if he thinks he has much greater 'power'. How exactly is this power defined? And where does this idea leave the problem of racism between racial minorities? Does that not count as racism any more? Isn't one rule for white, another for blacks racist in itself?

But today I want to focus on the basic hypocrisy behind all this. Anti-racism was once a noble sentiment. I was under the impression – I think we all were – that racism used to mean something like the following:

“a wrong done to (or a dislike taken towards) someone, on the basis of their ‘race’ or skin colour”

It meant this for a long time, and the fight against this sort of racism had much moral sway. But at some stage a deeply dubious subclause was added (by some) so the new definition became:

“a wrong done to (or a dislike taken towards) someone, on the basis of their ‘race’ or skin colour, but only if they are on the wrong end of a power relation”

Never mind that this ‘power relation’ was undefined and undefinable, everyone knew what the point of it was – to provide a specious rationale for saying that black people could not be called ‘racist’ under any circumstances. Now the only racists were white people. Put this way, it becomes clear where the actual discrimination by race lies. Some want a political stick to beat white people with.

The (creaky) reasoning behind it could be – for all I know - that  white people have “too much” or disproportionate power in the United Kingdom, so that any means are justifiable to try and reduce that power.

But if the meaning of the term “racism” is being casually altered to put one set of people in power and kick another out, then anti-racists are not acting from principles of equality and justice, and merely playing politics, as dishonestly as any politician ever did.