Good news for anybody stuck in 1818: The Sun and The Times have both shared the incredible revelation that according to “snowflake students”, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus should be pitied.
Here’s The Sun:
Next the snowflakes will be telling us that The Metamorphosis wasn’t really about cockroaches and that Jonathan Swift didn’t really want us to eat children.
As the kids might put it: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Secondary ticketing – the sites ripping off consumers by charging enormous fees on top of industrial scale ticket touting – is in the news again today. We need more transparency about their charges, apparently.
That’s true: the sites use every trick in the book to hide their fees, which are ridiculous. There’s a huge service charge, which can be as much as 30%, and the sites take a cut of the seller’s money too, typically 10% to 15%. Consumers are gouged at every opportunity. For example, GetMeIn – owned by Ticketmaster and promoted heavily on its site, and on the screens in venues such as the SSE Hydro in Glasgow – charges £10.57 to post your tickets in the UK. You’d think its buyer and seller fees might include the cost of an envelope and a stamp.
Transparency isn’t the big problem here. It’s the entire industry. These sites, and the sections of the industry that feed them, are making music unaffordable for ordinary people.
What we really need is more transparency about the sheer corruption of the concert ticketing industry. Ticket touting is happening on an industrial scale, and the idea that reselling is just ordinary people who discover they can’t go is absolute bullshit.
This is an industry worth £1 billion per year in the UK.
Here’s Viagogo, one of the reselling sites, with one of the 28 pages of tickets for the Rolling Stones in Edinburgh. Many of the sellers apparently bought four or six tickets before suddenly remembering that they couldn’t go.
Here’s Iron Maiden’s manager, Rod Smallwood, who found nearly 7,000 tickets for his band’s tour on the resale sites within 48 hours of going on sale.
“The implication is that 6,294 people decided within two days of buying a ticket for a concert taking place in 9 months’ time, all of a sudden they can’t go. I mean it’s sheer nonsense, it was just profiteering to the worst degree. The secondary platforms give the real heavy duty touts the ability to sell tickets on an industrial scale.â€
This is anti-consumer behaviour. It’s making art something only the well-off can experience, because whenever you have something for which demand will always outweigh supply you’ll attract sharks.
And the government knows this. This kind of profiteering with football tickets is illegal under section 166 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, further amended by section 53 of the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006. It was also illegal to re-sell tickets for the 2012 Olympics.
It should be illegal for music too.
If you’d like to know more, the FanFair Alliance has some excellent information for you.
This video, by Sarah McBride, is very good. It asks a very simple question: if your loved one came out as trans, what kind of world would you want them to live in?
This one’s about being enormously sociable on the internet and completely alone in real life. David came up with the main riff while messing around with the SoundPrism app, and despite my best efforts to turn it into a punk-metal song it ended up much more floaty. You can imagine Snoop Dogg rapping over it. Well, I can.
This one’s three years old, and it’s about optimism: after a year of treatment my depression seemed to be on the way out, and I wanted to try and capture that in music. I love David’s guitar in this: it’s woozy and languid, which fits the subject perfectly.
Most of the time when I write words I imagine somebody else writing them, so while I’m in there not everything is autobiographical: it’s imagining somebody whose illness was much worse than mine, leaving burnt bridges and ruined relationships in its wake. So while it’s about optimism and starting again it’s also about the crushing loneliness of someone who’s hit rock bottom: “the sun is gonna shine today” is as much of a prayer as it is a statement.
I posted the other day about supposed trans-species people, but I think my point got a bit lost.
There’s no such thing as a dragon spectrum, where some people are a little bit dragon and others quite a lot.
There’s no chromosome that makes you an elf.
No hormone that’ll make you a werewolf.
Whereas transgender people are part of the infinite variety of human brains and bodies.
Think of it like making soup: a slight change in the recipe, in the quality of the ingredients, in the way you cook, in the amount of seasoning you add or the time you cook can have a big effect on the end result.
What’s true for minestrone is equally true for human beings. Our biological soup has room for all kinds of variations.
Conservative MP Nadine Dorries on Twitter:
Body language of traitor Major sat next to her is revealing. https://t.co/HNabKkr9dp
— Nadine Dorries (@NadineDorries) February 28, 2018
This is incredibly dangerous, and she’s not the only MP using such language. And of course certain newspapers run headlines about “enemies of the people”.
These aren’t words that anybody should use when violent nationalism is resurgent.
This is the kind of language that gets people killed.
Imagine if journalists writing articles about things spoke to people with expert knowledge of those things.
That’s what Caitlin Logan does.
To find out what concerns Scottish women’s groups may have about gender reform, trans people and self-ID, she spoke to women’s groups: Engender, Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, the Young Women’s Movement (YWCA Scotland), Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, Forth Valley Rape Crisis, Edinburgh Women’s Aid, and Shakti Women’s Aid.
This is what a trans debate should look like: sober, sensible, well-informed. The reason we don’t get that debate is because all too often, the only opinions sought by journalists are from bigots and cranks.
The Scottish Government’s consultation on gender reform ends this Thursday, and has been the subject of a co-ordinated campaign by said bigots and cranks. If you have a more reasoned opinion, it’d be great if you could add your voice.Â
Here’s what the Equality Network has to say in its open letter to LGB people, our friends and our families.
This is a debate about how some of the most marginalised people in our community are treated. It’s about making things just that little bit easier for trans people. It’s about dignity but most of all its about making Scotland a more equal place.
As Logan’s article makes it clear, a great deal of what you’ve read about the proposed reforms simply isn’t true.
Here’s one of my favourite jokes.
A man walks into a bar and orders a drink. He looks at the other patrons and realises that the man next to him has a small orange for a head.
“Excuse me,” he says. “I can’t help noticing that –”
“I have a small orange for a head?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to know why?”
“Yes. Yes, please.”
“Well, once upon a time I found a grimy old lamp. I cleaned it up with an old rag and to my great surprise a genie popped out. ‘O Master!’ he said. ‘You have freed me from my prison! I shall grant you three wishes!’ Great, I thought. So I wished for great riches and good health, and he granted me both.”
“My goodness!” said the first man. “So what on earth was your third wish?”
“My third wish?”
“Yes!”
“Oh,” said the man. “I just wished I had a small orange for a head.”
The case of Luis Padron reminded me of it, because he too has a small orange for a head.
No, not really. But he’s spent £45,000 to make himself look like an elf.
This, inevitably, is being reported as him being “trans-species”, which he isn’t, because elves don’t exist.
Also, he specifically says he isn’t trans-species. The Daily Mail:
During his appearance on This Morning Luis revealed that he is often described as ‘trans-species’ but says that this is not something he agrees with.
That said, this time last year he reportedly told the Daily Mail that he did consider himself trans-species “in the same way transgender people feel”.
The Mirror went with this headline:
‘Trans-species’ fantasy lover born in wrong body risked life for costly and painful £45,000 transformation into an ELF
Whether Padron believes himself to be trans-species doesn’t really matter, though. Some people do claim to be trans-species, and they’re problematic for trans people.
We’re the last people to want to police other people’s identities, but this stuff is inevitably used to delegitimise trans people: the “identify as” trope that’s used to belittle and mock us.
(Incidentally, there’s a fascinating article to be written about the surgeons who facilitate these transformations, like the US border surgeons who treat the mental illness of body dysmorphia by amputating healthy limbs: there’s a lot of money moving around. But again, this is problematic because people would lump them in with the surgeons who operate on trans people.)
I have absolutely no problem with anybody who wants to look like an elf, or a cat, or Barbie’s partner Ken. But there’s a huge difference between that and being transgender. Identifying as a werewolf, as some people do, is just dicking about on the internet. Getting yourself to look like an elf is akin to wanting a small orange for a head.
This matters because trans people are, as I’ve written before, the target of a wedge strategy attacking all LGBT people. The word “real” is used again and again. Equal marriage is not real marriage. Trans women are not real women. Being trans is not a real thing.
Rights are only for real people.
In other words, this shit has consequences.
Claiming to be trans-species (or trans-racial, a term used in adoptions but appropriated by a white woman called Rachel Dolezal amid much controversy) gives people yet another stick to beat transgender people with.
It filters through the culture, too.
Here’s David Sexton, sniggering in The Standard over books by two people pretending to be animals in order to get book deals:
Transgender has a challenger. Once the Kardashians have become leaders in the field, transgender can hardly claim to be transgressive…Â Time to move on. A new frontier beckons. Trans-speciesism is the future. There are plenty of people out there who suffer from species dysphoria these days. They feel they are a non-human species trapped in a human body, rather along the lines in which transgender people feel gender dysphoria. We may just be at the start of a major new liberation movement.
Does he finish with the “I identify as…” trope? Of course he does.
For myself, I have long identified as, essentially, a parrot, a blue-fronted Amazon I think: cheerful jabbering and plenty of nuts.
Here are some tweets and comments about Padron’s story.
“See what happens when we give a bit of understanding to nutters? Trans has now moved on to this. But we must accept this as normal in our schools I suppose.”
“He looks like a fairy. Maybe one day he will realise he wants to be a woman.”
“I was waiting for species to be added to the list of trans identities.”
“This BE WHO YOU REALLY ARE trend has got to stop!”
In many cases trans-species is used to argue against the whole trans political-correctness-gone-mad thing, with commenters urging others to check out the videos of virulent alt-right bigots.
This is part of the drip-drip-drip I’ve blogged about previously. Seeing somebody described as “trans-species” on breakfast television might not mean much to you or have any effect on your day, but for us it’s different: it’s yet another thing people use against us, yet more “evidence” that we aren’t real.
This is absolutely terrifying: YouTube has a “conspiracy ecosystem”.
YouTube viewers who started searching for information on “crisis actors†— people who supposedly play roles as mass shooting survivors to push gun control — could soon find themselves tumbling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies about the the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the JFK assassination and Pizzagate, the hoax about a supposed child molestation ring run by Democratic Party luminaries out of a Washington pizzeria.
“It’s a conspiracy ecosystem,†said Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. “It’s growing, not only in size but in depth.â€
Exactly the same thing happens on Facebook.
The problem is “trending” content, the stuff you’re recommended by Facebook and YouTube’s algorithms, which then leads to other things.
As Frederic Filloux writes in his Monday Note newsletter:
For both YouTube (the world’s main provider of videos) and Facebook (the dominant vector of fake news), solving this problem would actually be easy: kill Trending Topics, which has a terrible track record. But neither tech giant will do that, because that’s where the advertising money is.
That money is mainstreaming extreme views. Some of the people who subscribe to the “crisis actor” bullshit are violent bigots; therefore if you view some crisis actor bullshit you’re likely to see other content relevant to violent bigots. It’s not long before you’re in very disturbing territory.
As the columnist Christopher Mims notes:
Facebook is a unique enabler of extremism, full stop. “If it’s outrageous, it’s contagious†is literally the bedrock, fundamental modus operandi of its engagement-optimizing algorithms.