Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • The march of idiocy

    I wrote about the horrors of unvaccinated children the other day. This is a great example of the problem.

    The article is about Shanelle Cartwright, the wife of an Australian rugby player. Over 400-odd words it regurgitates nonsense she posted on social media, describing her refusal  to vaccinate her kids as a “controversial decision”.

    It’s not a controversial decision. It’s a dangerous decision that could threaten the lives of other people’s children.

    This happens constantly in media, in all kinds of subjects: someone refusing to accept settled science is portrayed as part of a debate where both sides have equal value. But they don’t. The Earth is not flat. We landed on the moon. The Holocaust happened. Climate change is real. Barack Obama wasn’t born in Kenya. Vaccination saves lives.

    A recent study found that nearly 10% of Americans think vaccines are unsafe. That doesn’t mean that nearly 10% of Americans know more than science. It means that nearly 10% of Americans are idiots.

    I briefly subscribed to a Reddit section about stupid people on Facebook. I had to unsubscribe again because the sheer, grinding, unrelenting idiocy of it was making me fear for humanity. It’s just wall to wall insanity: nurses claiming that the sun can’t damage your skin, people telling cancer patients to forget chemo and cut down on sugar instead, people sharing graphics showing that vaccinations include a range of lethal chemicals including dihydroxen monoxide.

    Dihydrogen Monoxide is better known as H2O.

    I wish I was making this up.

    Never mind asking whether these people should be given a platform. I don’t think they should be given cutlery.

    It’s really very simple: idiots shouldn’t be given a platform to spout idiocy unless you make it really, really clear that they have no idea what they’re talking about. We generally don’t give column inches or air time to people who believe that the world is flat, because it isn’t. But with vaccination, climate change and other hot-button topics, we repeatedly give idiots a megaphone. And every time we do, we legitimise their bullshit and the world gets a little more stupid.

  • In whose face? Down whose throat? For God’s sake, let it go

    When was the last time you had objectionable content rammed down your throat? Because according to the internet, it’s happening constantly. All over the world, people are getting things rammed right down their throats.

    Except, of course, they aren’t.

    Here’s an example. Today, one of my friends was reading a Facebook thread about a children’s cartoon, Frozen. The thread was based on a report that in the sequel, one of the female characters – Elsa – may have a girlfriend.

    You can guess the response. Over 1,000 comments with tons of: people are trying to force politics into everything! It’s political correctness gone mad! I’ve got nothing against LGBT people, but why do they have to ram this stuff down our throats?

    First of all, nobody’s ramming anything down anything. You’re a grown adult moaning about a cartoon that hasn’t been made yet.

    Secondly, politics is in everything. As my friend posted on Twitter:

    Everything is political.

    If you think letting cartoon characters (🤦🏻‍♂️) only have heterosexual relationships is not political, you’re wrong. If you think having only white characters on TV is just, like, normal, and ‘adding’ people of colour is PC-gone-mad, think harder.

    Newsflash: gay people exist, have always existed, and always will exist. To exclude gay characters  (or Asian characters, or Black characters, or trans characters, or…) is a political act; whether consciously or otherwise, it’s choosing not to reflect reality.

    As another commenter noted, pretty much every female character in Disney movies has a love interest – a straight one, although not necessarily a human one. For example, in Beauty And The Beast  the lead character, Belle, dates a monster – the titular Beast – after he kidnaps her.

    This is a cartoon in which one of the key characters is a living, talking snowman, from a company whose previous films included living teapots, talking animals and a duck who goes around in people clothes but who never wears trousers.

    If you are outraged by the presence of an inoffensive gay character in a cartoon, you’re a bigot.

    If you’re okay with your kids seeing a guy developing superpowers because he was bitten by a radioactive spider but you can’t hack the idea of them seeing a girl with a girlfriend, you’re a bigot.

    If you can accept your kids seeing an enormous angry space monkey fly a spaceship but can’t face the thought of them seeing two girls holding hands, you’re a bigot.

    If you feel that letting gay kids (or black kids, or trans kids, or…) see the occasional character a bit like themselves among the thousands upon thousands of characters that are white, cisgender and straight, you’re a bigot.

    What, exactly, do you think these characters are going to do? Do you think that the cartoon will include an extended fisting scene? Will the denouement be delayed for some lovingly animated ass play? Are they going to change the snowman song to “do you want to see a dildo?”

    What is wrong with you?

    There’s a core belief here, which is that if children see a gay character on screen it might turn them gay. And there are two responses to that. One is “so what?” The other is to point out that it really doesn’t work like that. I spent 40-something years seeing cisgender people on TV, in cartoons and in films. If trans people were featured, which they generally weren’t, they were murderers making shirts out of women’s skin (Silence of the Lambs) or were portrayed as they were in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, in which Jim Carrey discovers he’s kissed a trans woman, throws up twice, uses an entire tube of toothpaste to brush his teeth, strips naked, throws his clothes in the trash, burns them and then weeps in the shower.*

    Guess what? Still trans.

    Every time somebody says they don’t want political correctness shoved down their throat, what they mean is that they believe that the minority in question is sinful, shameful or evil in some other way – that the minority is less than human and deserving of fewer rights than others.

    We must protect our children! they holler.

    Protect them from what?

    Right now, my group’s the one getting most of the “protect the chiiiiiiiiiiiiildren” nonsense. Previously it was lesbians; before that, gay men. Before that, black people. And so on.

    And it’s everywhere. On the social network Reddit, one visitor to a trans discussion forum asked a whole bunch of questions (now removed) and made the comment that they personally were cool with trans people and LGBTQ people generally, but why did they have to shove it in people’s faces all the time?

    My reply:

    We aren’t the ones having gender reveal parties, dressing babies in babygros with “Ladies Man” printed on them, obsessing over what other people do in bathrooms or bed or approaching complete strangers in the street and shouting that they’re abominations. We aren’t demanding that you can be discriminated against in health and in housing, in employment and education, and that you shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military, teach children or take part in public life. We aren’t regularly writing in the papers and online about how people like you are all pedophiles and potential rapists. But sure, if we go to a parade once a year we’re the ones shoving things in people’s faces. I’m rolling my eyes pretty hard here.

    Back to Facebook.

    There are, yes, and the overwhelming majority of entertainment is made by them, for them. And yet any time there’s the slightest hint of a non-white or non-straight or trans character in anything, thousands of straight people lose their shit. They lost their shit when Ghostbusters was remade with female leads, one of whom was abused horrifically because she was not just a woman but a black woman. They lost their shit when a Star Wars film featured an Asian woman in a prominent role (and some of them made a version of the film where all the women were removed). And now they’re losing their shit at the thought that one of the characters in Frozen might have a girlfriend instead of just a talking snowman who doesn’t ever melt.

    I’ll give the last word to Elsa.

    I don’t care what they’re going to say. Let the storm rage on.

    * The scene isn’t just offensive for its mockery of trans women. It’s a deliberate parody of the scenes in dramas where women are traumatised after a sexual assault or rape. Think about that for a moment: rape as comedy. You just know that it wasn’t a woman who wrote that scene (it was a man, Jack Bernstein), or who directed it (it was directed by Tom Shadyac, a man), or who signed it off (the producers were Gary Barber, Peter Bogart, Bob Israel and James G Robinson, who are men). This is what happens when your productions aren’t inclusive.

    There’s more about transphobia in popular culture here.

  • A sinister agenda

    One of the most widely circulated anti-trans stories is that Soham child murder Ian Huntley is trans. The Star reported it 10 months ago, and it’s regularly trotted out by anti-trans groups and repeated in newspapers.

    Look what Jeremy Vine posted today.

    It’s from yesterday’s Star.

    Like the vast majority of such stories, it was a complete fabrication. Good luck waiting for the retractions from The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman, The Sunday Times’ Janice Turner, The Telegraph, Fair Play For Women, The Spectator’s James Kirkup…

    The point here is not that bad people cannot be trans, or that trans people cannot be bad. The point is that some newspapers, journalists and celebrities are not objective or ethical when it comes to writing about trans people, and will print pretty much anything if it supports the narrative of a sinister transgender agenda. The Huntley story was always, obviously dubious, and yet none of the people who wrote about it bothered to do the simplest bit of journalism: get on the phone and find out if it was true.

    This is happening far too often for it to be anything other than malicious. UK newspapers have repeatedly had to retract stories about trans people because the stories were untrue. Those stories have been used by anti-trans bigots to campaign against trans people’s rights, and to spread fear and hatred of trans people. This particular story produces 95,000 Google results and is used so frequently that ten months since publication, anti-trans activists were posting about it on Twitter this morning – just before Vine posted the photo of the retraction.

    The stories, and the fear and hatred they engender, live on long after the inevitable retractions.

  • For frack’s sake

    The Times, on Twitter:

    Almost 50 geoscientists have urged the government to commission an urgent review of the fracking earthquake limit, which they suggest should be raised to allow the industry to expand

    Sam Knight, a writer, also on Twitter:

    Of the 48 people that signed the letter, I could not confidently identify 9. I think one works for BP and another works for Shell. Many are not experts in any recognisable way. But it doesn’t really matter. Because, of the remaining 39, all have links to gas and oil companies.

    …Several signatories openly brag about their industry funded research. Many used to work for oil and gas companies. Quite a few still work for those companies. And others are not even practising scientists, but directors of a business in the energy sector.

    This isn’t just yet another example of how The Times and its sister titles often publish advocacy and rarely bother to check credentials. It’s part of a wider problem where supposedly independent experts are nothing of the sort.

    The Taxpayer’s Alliance is a good example. It keeps its funding secret because it doesn’t represent the ordinary working stiffs it claims to; it’s an advocacy group for the super-rich, who fund it out of their very deep pockets.

    Whether it’s the super-rich pretending to be ordinary people, religious fundamentalists claiming to be ordinary parents or anybody else with an agenda pretending they don’t, every time they’re given a platform the platform provider is failing its viewers, its listeners or its readers.

  • Murderous delusions

    Image from Reddit. Creator unknown.

    On Friday, hundreds of US parents protested against the vaccination of children. I liked the Huffington Post headline: Parents Protest For Kids’ Right To Suffer From Preventable Illness. 

    The protest was in Washington State, which is currently in the middle of a measles epidemic. The parents are trying to stop a bill that would remove personal or philosophical exemptions for child vaccination. It’s an attempt to stop a dangerous trend: the WHO describes the anti-vaccination movement as one of the top threats to global health in 2019.

    The anti-vax movement is profoundly anti-scientific, and repeats the non-existent link between autism and vaccination popularised by the thoroughly discredited charlatan Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield, sadly, is still peddling his nonsense and thousands of parents believe it.

    It’s important to stress here that vaccines are among the most studied medicines in human history. There is no link between vaccination and autism. None.

    The parents who campaign against keeping children alive aren’t malicious. But they’ve fallen victim to the same thing that drives climate change denial or flat-Earthism: I can’t see it, therefore it can’t exist.

    It also ties in with anti-government, anti-expert sentiment. How dare you tell me what I need to do to protect my children?

    This isn’t a movement of stupid people, or uneducated people, although some anti-vax posters on social media might persuade you otherwise. The demographics skew heavily in favour of reasonably affluent, reasonably well-educated middle-class white women.

    It’s cruelly ironic that vaccines have fallen victim to their own success: we no longer see the victims of the diseases they eliminate. My generation and the generations after me haven’t grown up around children whose limbs have been destroyed by polio. We haven’t seen people’s faces scarred and distorted by smallpox. We don’t know of brothers or sisters who died from whooping cough.

    If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

    The parents’ murderous delusion could kill not just their own children, but other people’s children too. Some children don’t have the luxury of choosing whether to be vaccinated or not: they’re too young, or they don’t have access to health care, or they have medical conditions that would make vaccination unsafe, or they’re still in the womb. With a successful vaccination programme those children are protected: herd immunity means that it’s effectively impossible for dangerous diseases to exist in a community, so the likelihood of these children being exposed is near zero.

    That only works if most children get vaccinated, though. When the numbers fall even a little bit, below 90 to 95%, herd immunity disappears and preventable, deadly diseases recur. That’s exactly what’s happening now. For example, in Clark County – part of the same state where the anti-vaxxers were protesting – just 78% of nursery school children have had the full slate of vaccination. 43 of those unvaccinated children have contracted measles. In the US alone, more than 9 million children are currently at risk of contracting measles as a result of under-vaccination.

    This isn’t an argument to be won on facts, on debating whether or not vaccines are safe. The anti-vaxxers have seen the evidence and simply choose not to believe it. The only way to change these people’s minds appears to be to show them the horrific consequences of the diseases the vaccines prevent, and the danger they’re putting so many children in.

  • Drill: the presumption of guilt

    Drill musicians Reds, K Trap and Mischief. Image from YouTube.

    As long as people have made music, other people have tried to censor it. The famously miserable song Gloomy Sunday, originally published in 1933, was banned by the BBC until 2002. George Formby’s When I’m Cleaning Windows was banned in 1940 for its supposedly smutty lyrics. More recently, bands were banned from airplay during the Gulf War for having the wrong name, such as Massive Attack. And of course there have been attempts to ban entire genres of music such as heavy metal and gangsta rap.

    It’s easy to laugh at this stuff, but sometimes it’s deadly serious. Take the case of drill music, a genre so subversive it can land you in prison for performing it. Guess which repressive regime that happens in?

    England.

    Writing in The Observer, Kenan Malik describes the case of two drill musicians, Skengdo and AM from the Brixton group 410. Last month they were given nine-month suspended sentences for performing a song.

    The case is deeply disturbing, because while the police claim that drill incites violence the two musicians have not been charged under the pertinent legislation. The instrument used against them was a Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO), the latest incarnation of the infamous anti-social behaviour order (ASBO).

    As Malik writes:

    Skengdo and AM were served with an injunction without having been convicted of a crime. Breaking the injunction is a criminal offence. They’ve been criminalised for making violent music without having been convicted of any offence of violence.

    I don’t understand drill music; it’s not really aimed at the oh-so-lucrative white middle-class middle-aged trans demographic. It may well glamourise violence, and it may well be linked with gang activity. But the law exists to protect all of us, and part of that protection means that we should not be criminalised without due process.

    Index on Censorship is no fan of drill music, but it points out that this is hardly the first time minorities have used music to describe their lives.

    Drill is less about inspiring violence and more about providing a narrative of lives defined by violence. They are telling the stories of their lives, minus the sugar-coating, just as other writers, poets and musicians have done before them.

    They continue:

    The right to freedom of expression is considered by many to be a cornerstone of a modern democratic society. Countries that fail to adequately protect this hallowed right – routinely censoring journalists, writers and musicians whose speech challenges and offends those in power – are rightly regarded by the West to be the worst examples of dictatorial, autocratic regimes.

    Free expression is not the same thing as freedom from consequences. But there appears to be a curious double standard here.

    The press’s free-speech brigade are quick to defend the speech of racist populists such as Tommy Robinson, of alt-right dog whistling and of all kinds of repellent individuals. Freedom of speech, after all, means freedom of speech for views many people will find repellent. And yet the Spectator and Spiked and all the other Voltaire-misquoting defenders of offensive expression have been completely silent about the censorship and criminalisation of drill musicians.

    It’s strange, isn’t it? They defend the speech of the white Tommy Robinson, of the white Count Dankula, of the white Milo, of various other white alt-right types – sometimes even the speech of white people who are actual neo-Nazis. And yet they’re completely silent about the ongoing censorship and criminalisation of black musicians. I wonder what the difference could be?

  • MAGA: Make Auschwitz Great Again

    Dachau. Image by Nonethelesser, Wikimedia.org

    You don’t need me to tell you about the horrors of the Holocaust, of the brutally efficient attempts to wipe out Jewish people, Roma and LGBT people. But somebody clearly needs to tell the yahoos of Turning Point, the Trump-aligned, MAGA hat-wearing political group that’s just set up shop in the UK with the endorsement of Nigel Farage.

    There are tons of reasons to detest and refuse to give a platform to these arseholes, who illustrate the paradox of tolerance: if you refuse to silence the intolerant, eventually they will come to silence you. But even by their despicable standards, this is disgusting. Speaking in London, Candace Owens of Turning Point spoke favourably about Hitler:

    But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize.

    Hitler just wanted to Make Germany Great Again. To Owens, taking his “dreams” global is “not nationalism”. She adds: “I don’t really have an issue with nationalism. I really don’t.”

    Owens is not some random who grabbed a mic. She’s Turning Point’s communications director, so presumably she’s articulating the organisation’s policy here. She doesn’t really have an issue with genocide as long as it’s local.

    This is Holocaust denial in a nice dress, Holocaust denial with millionaire backing, the kind of Holocaust denial that gets invited to dinner parties and to share its “controversial views” as part of a “debate”.

    To go online at the moment is to feel the dread hand of history repeating. Anti-semitism is once again widespread. Racism and bigotry is vocal and unafraid and raising huge sums via crowdfunding. Views that used to be the preserve of the National Front are given airtime, unchallenged, on our national broadcaster. And organisations such as Turning Point run “professor watchlists” of people they consider ideologically impure and consider themselves to be fighting a new world war.

    We say “never forget” and “never again” not just because the Holocaust was a horror it’s hard to contemplate without going mad, but because the Nazis didn’t begin with the camps. Germany went from one of the world’s most progressive countries to Hell on Earth in an incredibly, terrifyingly short period of time. They didn’t ride to power promising to murder Jews. They promised to make Germany great again.

  • O wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us

    You might not be aware of this, but the anti-trans stance of English (and more recently, Scottish) newspapers is greeted with bafflement in the rest of the world. The New York Times tries to explain English anti-trans activism for its readers.

    If the idea that transphobic harassment could be “feminist” bewilders you, you are not alone. In the United States, my adoptive home, the most visible contemporary opponents of transgender rights are right-wing evangelicals, who have little good to say about feminism. In Britain, where I used to live, the situation is different.

    There, the most vocal trans-exclusionary voices are, ostensibly, “feminist” ones, and anti-trans lobbying is a mainstream activity.

    This is peculiar to mainland Britain. When anti-trans bigots tried to export their bile to Ireland, huge numbers of Irish feminists told them to piss off.

    So why is England so different? Edie Miller suggests that “the answer lies in part to the coalescence of a certain set of ideas in a very specific circle of voices in the early 21st century — voices that later went on to hold high profile positions in much of the U.K.’s print and broadcast media.” Between those voices and the anti-trans obsessives of Mumsnet – “Mumsnet is to British transphobia more like what 4Chan is to American fascism”, Miller writes – a moral panic has ensued.

    But why England? Back to the NYT.

    In other parts of the world, including America, mass movements in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s around the effects of globalization and police brutality have produced long overdue dialogue on race, gender and class, and how they all interact. In Britain, however, the space for this sort of dialogue has been much more limited. As a result, middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have.

    Many of these people believe they are doing God’s work. But they’re working for the other guy.

  • This is what bias looks like

    This is the latest story in the Times and Sunday Times’ ongoing campaign against trans people. Even by those low standards, it’s a pathetic attempt at turning something innocuous into a hit piece.

    The tweet in question was posted in November. Here it is:

    It’s a thoroughly unremarkable bit of political social media, and the supposedly inflammatory poster – the fourth image in the tweet – is a pretty innocuous “don’t be a dick” poster suggesting that it’s possible to be pleasant and respectful to trans people. It’s worth pointing out, because the Times never does, that the major women’s groups in Scotland – Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, Zero Tolerance, Close The Gap, Engender and Equate Scotland among others – are proudly trans-inclusive.

    “Pro-trans bias”.

    Lets unpick that, shall we?

    “Pro-trans bias”. Bias is a negative word; it means to be inclined or prejudiced for or against a particular group, usually in an unfair way.

    To put it in this context is to say that to be pro-trans (or as I’d put it, pro-not being a dick to trans people) is a bad thing. The entire article is based on the flimsy premise that to post something mildly supportive of trans people is somehow shameful and something a politician shouldn’t be doing. It implies that by suggesting we should perhaps not be bastards to trans people, the politician is biased against non-trans people.

    The headline’s doing a lot of work, isn’t it?

    As ever, you can illustrate the point by changing the words. Swap “trans” for “catholic”, “jewish”, “Asian”, “black”, “gay”, “disabled”.

    As I say, bias is prejudice for or against a particular group. It’s something you’d be guilty of if, say, you accused a politician of “pro-trans bias” over an innocuous, two-month-old tweet but failed to report (let alone criticise) the UK government officials who repeatedly meet with rabidly anti-trans groups (Transgender Trend and Fair Play For Women twice and A Woman’s Place three times, with FPFW invited to a further two “round tables” to discuss limiting trans people’s rights) or the MPs who post anti-trans sentiment to social media.

    It’s the kind of thing you’d be guilty of if your columnists were activist supporters of anti-trans groups but failed to declare that in their regular anti-trans columns.

    It’s something you’d be guilty of if you repeatedly ignored the medical consensus on trans people in favour of scaremongering from activist groups.

    It’s something you’d be guilty of… you get the idea.

    Anti-trans bias in the press is so commonplace that to simply detail it would be a full time job, but the Times/Sunday Times has become so blatant it’s almost a parody of itself. If you buy these titles you’re helping to fund this bullshit.

  • The Sunday Times printed nonsense? Time for my shocked face

    What’s that? The Sunday Times has printed a load of old bollocks again? I’m shocked! Shocked!

    My lecture yesterday was about calls for internet regulation, and I mentioned the media panics over “suicide sites” in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016… you get the idea. We’re in the middle of another panic now.

    Enter the Sunday Times, which this weekend claimed we are raising a “suicidal generation” and that it’s all social media’s fault.

    Tom Chivers isn’t impressed:

    This is – and I don’t want to get too technical here, but bear with me – absolute bollocks from top to bottom.

    The truth is that while there are certainly tragedies, the actual number of teenagers who kill themselves is very small – and because the numbers are so small, even the slightest change can be made to look like a dramatic shift.

    Especially if you cherry-pick the numbers, as the Sunday Times did.

    The ST compared the most recent figures with 2010, which had the lowest rate of teen suicides since 1981. Chivers again:

    You could, if you wanted to, use the same trick to tell the exact opposite story. Facebook was first released in 2004, when the suicide rate among 15- to 19-year-olds in England and Wales was 4.7. But after six years of social media being available, it had dropped to 3.1! It’s a life-saver, no?

    The Sunday Times piece suffers from two key problems. One, social media isn’t causing a suicide epidemic among teenagers. And two, there isn’t a suicide epidemic among teenagers.

    If you look at 10- to 29-year-olds, it’s gone from a consistent plateau of about 15 per 100,000 from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, down to about nine per 100,000 by about 2004, and that’s where it’s stayed, pretty much. There’s a similar story among the population as a whole.

    Every suicide is a tragedy, but to peddle myths isn’t helping anybody. In fact, it might very well be letting the real culprits off the hook. As Natasha Devon MBE, who works with teenagers, posted on Twitter, the top reasons teenagers tell her their mental heath is suffering don’t include social media at all. They are:

    1. Academic anxiety;
    2. Lack of community support;
    3. Problems at home;
    4. No one to talk to;
    5. Loss of activities which helped them cope (eg sport/music);
    6. Worries about future.

    That doesn’t make for such an exciting headline. Reality rarely does.