I said goodbye and good riddance to the Left in politics a few years ago. It is patently obvious that Leftists not only have zero connections with 'ordinary' working class people, but hold them in contempt for cleaving to views that contradict leftist ideology. Seeing as the world is dividing into sides, I'd say choose your sides well. On the one side is politics and culture in its myriad divisions. It is parasitic and unproductive and tending to verbal and ideological inflation. On the other side are the people who make, move, build, and grow things. The age of instantaneous electronic media and communication make it seem that the former side is greater and more important than the latter, and various technocratic elites see the opportunity for top-down bureaucratic control in the situation. The so-called Left are on board with these designs for remote control, on the presumption that they, or at least enough of them, will be among the controllers. The mentality runs right through contemporary environmentalism. It is a delusion in every respect, which isn't to say that it's not a very real possibility.
The insanity is out in the open. If you can't see it, then you have been ideologically captured. We are now at the stage of working out what it will take to bring people back to their senses.
I could have wasted days taking screen shots of the rabid, errant nonsense being spewed out by liberals, leftists, and progressives, but one or two are more than enough. I can remember Einstein being informed of a thousand scientists saying he was wrong. He said that if he really was wrong, then one would be enough. Waste your time scrolling through social media if you life. I see one or two comments from the usual suspects and that's enough to tell me that they are wrong.
I'm glad to say that I don't know an awful lot about Ash Sarkar, other than the fact that every time I have the misfortune to hear her it is apparent she is a know-nothing ideologue feeding on division and controversy, pushing an agenda, yet entirely devoid of substance. The perfect social media figure, then. Social media has become a political blight, with politicians and representatives who have lost touch with the constituents – and with priorities that are quite the contrary of the people they are supposed to represent – coming to think social media in any way representative of the public voice. Social media is the place where active minorities congregate, people who are experts by way of nothing other than their own pet peeves and prejudices.
Sukar is saying something here that I have heard others on the Left say, and often. Or, rather, Sukar is saying something that other Leftists have said often, only in a more guarded and qualified manner. She says that working out what to do in elite competitive sports is “important,” but “not the most pressing issue” faced by women (I'll be damned if I ever use the term “cisgender women” instead of women.) Now which elite sportswomen has ever claimed that sport is the “most pressing issue” in her life, as in so important as to elide all other issues? None. It is the kind of false antithesis forcing simple either/or choices favoured by all fanatics and ideologues. I've seen the Left use this approach many times when it comes to deciding what falls down the list of priorities. Ultimately, every drops off the list except one thing – gaining and holding onto power.
Sukar expresses a variant of a view I have heard Leftists express many times, that sport doesn't matter, isn't important, and is an organised deviation and distraction. Because, of course, if the dumb, stupid masses were not absorbed in sports they would all become card carrying members of the Communist Party manning the barricades. The people who think this way are like religious fanatics who think that once all the distractions of life are stripped away people would all turn to God and the one and true religion.
It's tommyrot, from first to last. As I say, if you are struggling to know where to stand in an age dividing between sides, keep out of politics and cultures and ally with the people who are grounded, centred, productive, and social. If there is a future, it lies with the proles ..
Ash Sukar, like many Leftists, plainly has little connection with anyone outside of the world of talking heads and activists, absorbed in the outrage and issue of the day. Of course they couldn't care less about sport, or any other special interest, anything that requires talent, skill, commitment, and devotion. Devoid of meaning and content in themselves, they fill up the void in their lives with politics.
Leftists should run their prejuduces by the women and girls who do take part in and/or enjoy sport (elite or otherwise). I'm glad to say that I have been involved in women's sports and know women who play sports. I'm gladder still to say that they have nothing but contempt for all those who dismiss sport as unimportant, a mere distraction which diverts the attention of the stupid masses from politics. I know a young woman who plays for the local football team, takes 1-2-1 coaching sessions, coaches a local girls team, is studying sports science and is training to be a PE teacher. Tell her that her activities are not pressing! How presumptious of people to hold that their own obsessions – the politics of talking heads of all things! - are more important than others' interests and activities. The attitude is patronising, contemptuous, and plain wrong. The most stupid people here are the ideologues. But that can't be news, surely.
But there is another aspect to this. Women have been told since ever that they can wait for equality until other more important things are sorted. That's the problem with the language of priorities in politics. Politics, ultimately, can reduce to a power dynamic in which issues – and leaders – are selected according to the extent they serve power. Leftists need to learn this lesson and learn it quick (they haven't and never will) - sport is the canary in the coalmine. If women and girls are secondary in sport, they will be secondary everywhere.
So why do women on the Left in politics have such a hard time in understanding what the women who take part in and enjoy sport say? Part of the answer is the same reason why Leftists in general dismiss sport as an organised distraction that diverts attention from politics. I repeat – it is the classic stance of the fanatic and fundamentalist, in religion and politics both. At the heart of that claim is the presumption that people, when stripped of their distractions, will all fall in line behind the right religion and ideology. What is most striking about that view is the assumption on the part of its holders that they are in possession of the truth and are fundamentally right on all things. It never occurs to them that they may be wrong, biased, indoctrinated, stupid.
Sportswoman Mara Yamauchi's rebuttal of Sakar is to the point:
“Another woman throws female athletes in the bin. I have done sport ALL MY LIFE at ALL levels. You bet I care about it deeply. If Ash doesn't, fine, but then stay out of it & leave it to those who do care about it.”
That's my message to Leftists generally. Repeat your mistaken view that sport is unimportant, a mere distraction, all you like. And leave the rest of us alone to keep ignoring you until you get back on nodding terms with the human roots that feed an authentic politics.
I used to be staggered by the extent to which Leftists who claim to be about restructuring power and resources in favour of 'the people' go to such extreme lengths to remove themselves from the actual people. But I quickly saw the political dynamic at work. Leftists celebrate 'the people' in the abstract, but draw the line at flesh-and-blood individuals in the real. Leftist activists and ideologues are faithful to their political belief system first and foremost and consider any interests, practices, and activities that are not subordinate to its promotion as distractions to be removed. Hence they target the full range of loyalties and solidarities possessed by real people, seeking to remove them until all that remains is service to the all important ideology. Of course they attack attachments of family, faith, place, and polity, anything that keeps people wedded to an iniquitous status quo.
Some people are expressing perplexity at the “lack of sisterhood” and compentalisation at work, with women activists being more than willing to throw other women under the bus. I've never been a feminist. Nobody brings women down more than other women. There's never actually been a 'feminism.' There are clear divisions and oppositions within that umbrella term. You don't even need to look closely to see how the interests and concerns of educated middle class women have always prevailed over working class women. You can see the same mentality all over contemporary left liberal 'progressive' politics, the inanities and insanities of the middle class riding roughshoud over common sense.
This is what identity politics has done to the universalism and solidarity of the Left!
Making common cause with someone is now entirely dependent on their identity and which ideological and political views they hold. In future society, we will all be living in designated enclaves, according to which tribe we are a member on, which side we support, which party we support. The unity has gone, the old connections have been severed. How revealing it is to see the ideologues, adrift in the fantasy world of language, slicing and dicing people up according to identiy and then invent the word 'intersectionality' in the belief that it has the power to restore unity. To divide people according to identity is about the most stupid thing the Left could have done. They did it. Leftists really are spellbound, captives of a belief system that has no more substance than linguistic self-creation. They must think themselves God, 'in the beginning was the Word.'
When people expressing perfectly normal views are being gaslit by the media, by the corporations, and by the Left, you can rest assure that the Left are not Left at all.
Earlier I made reference to liberals, Leftists, and progressives. The truth is that these activists and ideologues are highly illiberal, authoritarian, and regressive. And they have zero connection with 'ordinary' working people, except those few sections who agree with their politics.
All you need are eyes with which to see, your normal senses working as they ought, without ideological filters. There is something amiss here. Women argue for their right to speak and are abused by men. Large masked men threatening, shouting down and intimidating women doesn't look good. And the police not only stand back but walk away.
That is somewhat peculiar to say the least.
You can try to work out why. Are the police anti-women? Organised chaos in the short run to justify authoritarian control in the long? Favoured identities over class in the corporate takeover of public business?
Ironically when 'populism' and 'the mob' is held up as an object of condemnation in mainstream politics, media, and culture, it is always in relation to causes which are not patronised by the middle class. Middle class causes are advanced by protestors, praised to the hilt, not 'mobs.'
I recently took an Internet test to discover what my ideal country is. It was a bit of fun, a way to idle time amidst the insanity of FB. All of my FB 'friends' who took this test came out, without exception, with a Scandinavian country, with hands pointed heavily to the feminine and away from the masculine, as in being right next to it. I won't say which country I came out with, but it wasn't Scandinavian. And my hand was firmly pointed in the direction of the masculine. My point is not to affirm the masculine over against the feminine, quite the reverse. The imbalance here is entirely on the part of those who, verbally at least, at the level of ideologically sound politics, value the feminine over the masculine. These are the people who routinely denounce 'toxic masculinity,' whilst presuming the feminine to be unimpeachably good. It's garbage. If there is a toxic masculinity, then it applies equally to femininity: in an older, now unfashionable, idiom, this refers to original sin and the fallen nature of 'man.'
My point is a serious one. I checked same said FB 'friends' for their take on this issue of women's spaces, sports, and rights. I wasn't surprised to see them, without exception, throwing women and girls under the bus in favour of an identity now ranked higher in the grievance hierarchy. These people are hypocrites and thoroughly unreliable politically. They'll sell anyone and anything short and out.
Talk about the revenge of the repressed. A few years ago I made the statement that 'the Left will one day make women reap what anti-essentialist, man-hating feminists have sown.' It was a provocative statement then, likely to lose whatever friends I had left among the Left and among feminists. But as every week passes, it's looking more and more true. Part of this is about the domination of women by 'feminine' Beta males whose emotions have overwhelmed their reason and their grip on reality. They are fragile and oppressed, comes the defence. Mob handed, they will eat you alive and not give it a second thought, if you give them the chance - and leftists, liberals, and progressives will. They are the same people whose permissiveness is now inviting and unleashing the forces which will bring down their Scandinavian dreamworld. They are too deluded, too self-convinced, to see it. If I didn't know any better [warning, conspiracy theory alert] I would think that powerful corporate forces are seeking to engineer the collapse of public welfare, before rebuilding the new order according to its own hierarchy – 'useless eaters' will be eliminated. If I didn't know any better [conspiracy theory alert], our lovely, benign, 'be kind' leftists, liberals, and progressives are being played beautifully by the technocratic elites.
The various causes of the liberal left have been taken over by extremists and fanatics who hate everything about 'normal' people and 'normal' society. Normality is to be smashed – 'smash heteronormativity' is a slogan that in practice translates easily into smashing heteronormative people. They hate society, they hate people. They say 'be kind' and proceed to behave in precisely the opposite way. They are driven by hate, by hate and power.
We are betting accustomed to lies, threats of violence, and outright denial of reality. It's a war of attrition that is designed to wear you down. Conservatives persist in describing these people as socialist. Their instincts for totalitarian repression are keen enough, but this is a misidentification that threatens to hand victory to the authoritarians. These people are Jacobins, power-crazed minorities who organize and agitate relentlessly, never taking a break. They seek to wear people down by constant pressure and controversy. People fall for it. They either get drawn into endless, unwinnable wars, and get worn down by the futility of it all, or they simply withdraw from politics in the hope it will all blow over. You have to stand and fight, but with great economy of effort. As I say, I hardly know this Ash Sarkar and certainly would not engage in lengthy exchanges with her. It's obvious what she is. A few short sharp words sum her up. Cleave to reality, state the truth, and put the neurotics and cranks on the backfoot.
The key question is determining what it will take to bring people back to their senses. If people can't see how ABSURD it is that MEN DRESSED AS WOMEN and people who aren't "either gender" get to dictate whether or not women get to have their say, their sports, their spaces, and their rights, then it really would seem hopeless. Appearances are, however, deceptive. The world of deceptive appearances is the natural habitat of the extremists and fanatics. If you fight them on their own ground they will pull you further down into the rabbit hole and wear you out. In a mediated culture and politics, where all is image and identity, it really can seem hopeless. But there is a world outside of this unreality pocket. It does seem that a lot of Western countries are losing their minds and becoming MORE irrational. It's a disease of particular countries, those who got swept away in the linguistic and cultural turn of the 1980s, based as it was on a philosophical anti-realism and a social constructivism. Some of us argued then that no good, only bad, would come of it. I think we can claim to have been vindicated. I only wish I had stayed on the building sites rather than waste decades in academia. I'll be long gone before I receive any thanks that are due.
And I'll make the same point with respect to the wasted decades I spent in the environmental movement. I had thought to buttress the environmental cause with an effective political and ethical dimension. Instead, a curious mix of scientism, nature fetishism, and culturalism dominates within an explicitly technocratic model. That this about as inorganic and anti-ecological a form as could be imagined, and yet too few environmentalists seem to notice. That's a sure sign of corporate capture and I'm out of it. I vehemently oppose the mobilization of crisis, emergency, fear, and necessity in politics. This is not merely a very low form of politics, it is an anti-politics premised on an inhumanism. Those who proclaim an emergency in order to instill fear and justify rule by authoritarian imposition reveal themselves to be too small and too cowardly to lead...
We are suffering the cultural authoritarianism of the social constructivism, gender, and social justice indoctrinated generation. Too many academics are not educators but activists and ideologues raising the next generation of cadre. The contemporary academy has a lot to answer for. Those so 'educated' are now occupying key positions in media and social institutions, in NGOs and Government. The graduate class that now dominate culture, society, and politics are delivering a very muscular progressivism. It means that when active, organised minorities take extreme positions they will be able to count on substantial support with which to face down 'populism' (now called 'fascism.')
Some innocent soul whose head is in a long gone age of chivalry asks: 'Where are all the strong men protecting women?'
The men are all minding their own business to avoid being called TOXIC. Some women, the most vocal and active women, told men to clear off years ago. You can’t have it both ways… Equal rights, equal fights.
Which returns me to the point I sought to make above: this is not about men vs women, masculine vs feminine but both together, equal in difference. The missing masculine is the missing feminine in the sense that the absence of one skews the character of the other through the loss of right relation. I'm not a feminist because I am not a masculinist.
Identity politics is slicing and dicing humanity up, turning people against one another, instilling real hatred. It is pure acid, dissolving warm and affective ties between people. And preferred identities are being enabled, encouraged, and emboldened by the powerful and influential. Other identities are being devalued and demonised. As a straight while male I hardly dare show my face on social media. These are dangerous times for people, men and women alike.
If people want to live in the land of make-believe and think that they are something which they are not, they should be free to live in peace – and leave the rest of us in peace. If people want to live a life of insanity that is their business – they have no right to force the rest of us to enter that nowhere land.
'If you want a picture of the future,' Orwell famously wrote, 'imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.' Orwell's imagery is too stark, too visible, too obvious to spell out the real danger to liberty. People are afraid of boots and take evasive action. Rainbows and unicorns, however, they love. But those things can turn nasty and vicious.
They enjoy the luxury of denying reality for now. Reality will eventually catches up with them, as it does with all of us. Whether it catches up in time is another matter. Always in politics I look beyond surface immediacy to underlying causes and agents and try to see the end game. For all of the excitement in the shallows and on the surfaces, the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form has continued apace. No one seems to have the first idea how to check the power of the corporations, let alone appropriate power and resources from them. The corporate form is prevailing over both 'free market' liberal capitalism and socialism, as those two old enemies continue to fight out their old war. So people don't even bother to take on the corporations, they are too big, too strong, too powerful. The worldview of the technocratic elites is explicitly anti-human. They condemn the bulk of the people as 'useless' and envisage them stupefied by playing video games, consuming pornography, and idling out their days going nowhere to no end. That's the Grave New World erected in the aftermath of the death of God.
And the 'progressives'? They are so afraid of facing their own responsibility for the fantasy world they live in that they invent a "fascist" threat they can righteously condemn and fight and thereby keep their consciences clean. The media and public sphere are completely captured.
I've written enough. I predicted precisely this a few years ago, writing a sharp piece last year. I have no intention of wasting my days by entering the lists on this, other than to state clearly and concisely that men have no business entering women's spaces and sports. It is that simple.
But we are dealing with cranks and neurotics. Whilst 'misgendering’ is ‘literal violence,' assaulting women in public is a ‘joyous celebration.' These people can’t tell their arse from their elbow, let alone male from female.
A 70 year old woman was repeatedly punched in the face by a man pretending to be a woman, because she doesn't think sharing spaces with men in womens clothes is safe. He made her point for her. If this is what they do in public, what will they do in toilets and bathrooms?
"Punch a Nazi" is a common phrase. Why is it that when actual Neo-Nazis showed up the "Activists" didn't run over and begin punching them instead of screaming at and spitting on women?
It's almost as if...
It all has an air of predictability about it, as though people are locked into scripts and roles that they cannot change.
In 2019 I wrote a prayer for peace in anticipation of the division and hatred to come. I also gave reasons as to why the world may nevertheless slide into a universal antagonism.
A year ago I wrote specifically on this issue of women's rights, predicting that certain groups of activists and ideologues will be getting not only into women's spaces but also women's faces. Violence has been entirely predictable.
I also think it is a symptom/example of western society’s ability to disagree but do so agreeably (to coin a phrase) has diminished markedly. An increasing minority will happily see harm done to their opponents/those not doctrinally pure.
People have been pressured into silence and coerced into complicity. The sleeping giant has been awakened, people will be silent no longer. The neurotics and cranks need to be swept out of politics and culture. They have all manner of reasons as to why they are right and we are wrong, why they are clever and we are stupid (and phobic and fascist). They are deluded. And you can't argue with a swamp.
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