Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Bullshit

Pernicious nonsense and other irritants

  • Don’t blame your neighbours. Blame the government

    The chorus of anger at people supposedly risking everybody’s lives by going to the park is growing louder, especially in the right-wing press; the government is now floating the idea that going outside at all may be banned “if people continue to flout the rules”.

    Don’t fall for it: it’s a deliberate attempt to bury bad news. The government (and its media cheerleaders) wants you to blame so-called “covidiots” because if you’re getting annoyed at them, you’re not getting annoyed at a government that’s gutted the NHS so badly that key frontline workers are being forced to make their own protective clothing out of bin bags.

    BBC News:

    Several healthcare workers in England have told the BBC of a lack of equipment in their hospitals. Warned against speaking to the media, they were unwilling to talk publicly.

    these medical professionals, who continue to care for critically ill patients for 13 hours every day, are having to resort to fashioning personal protective equipment (PPE) out of clinical waste bags, plastic aprons and borrowed skiing goggles.

    People are not going to die because your next door neighbour went for two walks today, or because someone sunbathed in the park. But people will die because of the decisions that left the UK short of health workers, of ventilators to treat the sick and of protective equipment for the doctors and nurses our politicians stand outside Downing Street to applaud.

  • Enemies of the people

    America’s The Daily Show has put together a video it’s dubbed “Heroes of the pandumbic”. It’s a compilation of US broadcasters (and the President who loves them) pooh-poohing the dangers of coronavirus; no prizes for guessing which media mogul’s network they’re all from.

    I’m sure you can think of some UK examples too.

  • There has never been a better time to use this image

    The image is of a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch in which a Nazi, played by Mitchell, wonders whether they might be the bad guys.

    PinkNews:

    Neo-Nazis and homophobes are among those supporting the UK ‘anti-trans’ pressure group the LGB Alliance.

    …There is nothing to suggest the LGB Alliance has sought or welcomed such supporters, but when asked by PinkNews to denounce neo-Nazis, the LGB Alliance refused.

    It doesn’t matter whether you officially support or welcome them; if you’ve convinced homophobes, lesbophobes, biphobes and neo-bloody-Nazis that you’re on their side and that your beliefs align with theirs, and you then refuse to even make a lukewarm statement that homophobia and nazism are bad, you’re showing exactly who you are.

  • A pandemic of stupidity

    What’s the connection between coronavirus and a burning phone mast in Birmingham?

    The answer, you’ll be amazed to discover, is idiots.

    The mast is a 5G phone mast; the idiots are the people on a local Facebook group who claimed that it was pumping out “massive radiation” and that “there is definitely a strong link between the ‘coronavirus’ and 5G”. They’ll no doubt be delighted that the mast went on fire the other evening.

    Here’s one of the locals:

    “As we are all locked up at our comfort homes, did you realise 5G have been busy in UK putting up there (sic) towers. Something to think about. The whole world was against 5G. And here we have it.”

    The concerns are largely ignorance. 5G uses radio waves, the same things that bring TV and radio to your house, and the current worries are just repeats: we had this over 4G, over 3G and over Wi-Fi. Those panics were without foundation and this one is too. But there’s an extra element this time, and that’s coronavirus. We’ve seen a significant uptick in 5G conspiracy-mongering here in the UK since we went into lockdown – for example, a video of a woman haranguing 5G-installing workers went viral on Twitter today – and sometimes the argument goes like this: 5G hardware is largely made in China; we didn’t have coronavirus before 5G went live; therefore 5G causes Coronavirus and the Chinese are doing it deliberately.

    I guess it makes a change from blaming the gays and the trans people for coronavirus, although that’s happening too.

    The cause of the fire hasn’t been established – it could just be an electrical fault rather than a conspiracy-believing arsonist – but the mast’s online infamy demonstrates the way in which disinformation spreads in times of crisis: with lots of people stuck home with nothing to do, bullshit spreads even more quickly than usual.

    [Update, 4 April: It was just a matter of time before the anti-trans loons worked 5G into their nonsense. Apparently “the increase in [5G] towers and the increase in ROGD” – a made-up term coined by bigots to pretend people coming out as trans is a mental illness – is “too close for coincidence”. It’s from the same mindset as Alex Jones screaming about a conspiracy to turn all the world’s frogs gay: once again, the line between anti-trans activists and the alt.right/far right is very, very faint.]

  • Fact-checking as fake news goes viral

    The BBC has put together a page fact-checking the latest coronavirus-related nonsense circulating on social media. Today’s crop includes disinfectant-spraying helicopters (nope), a memo from Bill Gates (fake), video showing Turkish food parcels (old) and the official-looking text messages you may be getting right now (criminals).

    As ever, Snopes.com continues to bust bullshit (if you’re in the US, they’re hiring!). The top 50 currently includes everything from Nostradamus predicting Covid-19 (nope) to whether the virus is a distraction created so we don’t panic about the doomsday asteroid that’ll kill us all (oh, come on).

    My favourite fake news story is the one about Russia releasing 500 lions into the streets to enforce its coronavirus lockdown (there isn’t a lockdown, and there aren’t any lions). As Snopes put it:

    No, but we don’t doubt the effectiveness of such a strategy.

  • God doesn’t want you to die of stupidity

     

    I’m normally a big fan of schadenfreude, the feeling of pleasure in others’ misfortunes. But so much of what I’m reading just now just makes me sad. For example, there’s no joy in seeing prime minister Boris Johnson admit to having coronavirus just days after boasting about shaking coronavirus patients’ hands; I’m just sad that he’s probably infected others who will in turn have passed the virus on. I feel sorry for his pregnant girlfriend, who must be terrified right now.

    One of the saddest things I’m seeing right now is people dying from arrogance, from misinformation and from tribalism. In the US, you’re much less likely to take the virus seriously if you’re a Trump voter, very religious or both; the lines aren’t as dramatic here in the UK but there’s still social media activity indicating a similar split between Brexit leaver and remainer.

    Viruses don’t care who you vote for or who you pray to.

    There’s an old Russian sailor’s proverb (often attributed to the gonzo writer Hunter S Thompson, but it was around for hundreds of years before him):

    Pray to God, but row away from the rocks.

    Sadly some people would rather row straight into the rocks and take lots of others with them.

    Here in Scotland, the evangelical politician John Mason initially refused to cancel his face-to-face surgeries and home visits to protect his constituents. When one church closed, he posted on Facebook:

    Surely we should be bold, take risks, and trust in Jesus?

    Trust in Jesus is not an effective anti-viral.

    I detest Mason, but I feel sad that his dark-ages idiocy could have caused people to become infected. And he’s not the only one. The usual contrarian clowns have had their say, and Scotland’s Free Presbyterian Church, another bunch of yahoos I’d happily see cast into a lake of fire, initially refused to cancel church services because:

    attending public worship is not a mere social activity or recreational pleasure

    This idiocy is global. In the US, pastor Landon Spradlin died from coronavirus this week. His death has made him internet famous because before he contracted the virus he shared online posts suggesting the media was creating “mass hysteria” over coronavirus; he also approvingly shared a tale of a missionary who cared for Black Death victims and never contracted the disease because God would ensure that “no germ will attach itself to me.” God must have been looking elsewhere this week. She’s got a lot on her plate.

    Spradlin had previously railed against helping poor and vulnerable people get healthcare; when he got sick, his family had to resort to a crowdfunding website “to help relieve them from the stress of the situation [and] medical bills.” Some people are finding schadenfreude in that, and some have gone as far as to abuse his grieving family on social media. I just feel sorry for their loss.

    And I also feel sorry for the other families who’ll grieve. Politicians’ inaction and media misinformation – particularly noticeable in the US, where the virus will kill many more people than 9/11 did – will cost many lives. As of today, the US has more coronavirus cases than anywhere else in the world. The toll so far is 1,297 deaths. There will be many more.

    You can sum up a lot of current events in a single story.

    No matter what god you may pray to, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want you to go out like that.

  • “Lazy contrarians are putting everyone at risk”

    Alex Andreou, writing for Politics.co.uk:

    I fully support Peter Hitchens and Brendan O’Neill’s inalienable right to be infected with a deadly virus. If they existed in a vacuum, I might buy myself one of those big foam fingers and cheer them on, as they march to the extinction that is the destiny of every dinosaur.

    But they don’t exist in a vacuum. They have no more a ‘right’ to keep congregating in pubs than they have a right to set fire to their flat on the ground floor of a skyscraper. Not following guidance, not distancing socially, doesn’t just imperil you. It is something that imperils my friends, my loved ones, everyone. Nobody has a right to put others at risk.

    … the very talking heads who have been, for some years now, telling everyone else to rediscover the Spirit of the Blitz, were revealed to be the morons who refused to turn their light off during a blackout and endangered their entire neighbourhood.

    It’s becoming very clear who the real “enemies of the people” are.

  • Bigots “not bigots”, say bigots

    Are the Ku Klux Klan racist? According to the Klan, they are not. They just have reasonable concerns about white people’s rights. As they put it in their flyers:

    “Why can’t pro-white rights organizations exist without being labeled racist?”

    As the Anti-Defamation League explains, the flyers are part of a strategy to “normalise white supremacy”: members no longer wear their robes and hoods and they dissociate themselves from violence. They claim that the fact that their followers are viciously racist is just a coincidence and nothing to do with them. “Members want to be able to express their white pride without being branded white supremacists – members prefer the term white separatists.” They argue that the rights of “other races” negatively affect theirs.

    What the KKK is trying to do is to rebrand itself, and part of that is to attempt to redefine what racism means. In their definition, racism basically comes down to lynchings and burning crosses: if you’re not actively doing them, you can’t be a racist organisation.

    That, of course, is  bullshit. And it’s why we don’t let white racists define what racism is or isn’t, because their definition excludes pretty much all forms of racism. Hate groups don’t get to define what is and isn’t hatred.

    Let’s go back to that statement from the KKK flyer and change two words.

    “Why can’t pro-women’s rights organizations exist without being labeled transphobic?”

    All the anti-trans hate groups claim that they aren’t transphobic. And that’s true, if your definition of transphobia excludes almost every form of transphobia, including your own past actions.

    In many cases, the high-profile anti-trans groups were co-founded by viciously transphobic people. Some now claim that their previously abusive anti-trans social media was run by the previous administration, with whom they now have no connection. Others pretend that their founding meetings featuring people calling trans women “parasites” and “bastards” who deserved violence and mocking trans women’s appearances never happened. And others’ bigoted founders – people who publicly called trans women “sick fucks” and claimed Jewish conspiracies – have conveniently died. They no longer wear their robes and hoods and they dissociate themselves from violence. The fact that many of their followers are abusive on social media is just a coincidence and nothing to do with them.

    The one thing that really annoys hate groups is when people rightly call them hate groups. And as the UnCommon Sense blog explains in detail, many of these groups clearly function as hate groups.

    A hate group is:

    “…an organisation that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

    As Buzzfeed’s Patrick Strudwick put it, these groups are telling us:

    We’re not transphobic, we just think you’re a danger to children, women, society, lesbians, gay men, feminism, yourselves, and should be excluded from everywhere we decide you shouldn’t be, and should be denied treatment, demonised, pathologised, ridiculed and debated endlessly.

    What’s hateful about that, apart from all of it?

  • “Be a lady, they said”

    Be a Lady They Said from Paul McLean on Vimeo.

    This is fantastic.

  • Some accident

    [Content note: slurs]

    The Morning Star has decided to prove once again that you don’t have to be right-wing to be hateful towards trans people. This is from the print edition:

    There’s a sour joke among trans people that anti-trans bigots have one joke, which is “I identify as / I’m transitioning to X”. But it isn’t usually portrayed in quite such a vicious manner as it is here.

    NW Durham constituency Labour Party:

    we can’t believe an allegedly socialist newspaper would publish something as vile as this.

    LGBTQ Bristol Labour:

    It heavily borrows from racist propaganda you see in a history book and hope never to see in real life. On a paper funded by unions. We condemn this completely.

    Guardian writer Owen Jones:

    This, in a supposedly leftwing newspaper, is absolutely twisted. The vicious, obsessive and unrelenting campaign against trans people is sadly far from confined to the right.

    This particular publication has been publishing virulently anti-trans stuff for several years now, but what’s different this time is it has apologised. From the website:

    The Morning Star apologises unreservedly for the publication last Tuesday of a cartoon which was offensive to trans people.

    The cartoon had not been authorised for publication and its appearance in the print edition represents a failure to follow our own procedures for approving submissions.

    Maybe it’s true and editorial standards at the Morning Star are so lax that cartoons can just leap into the pages without anybody knowing. But Occam’s razor suggests that what really happened here is that the publication simply didn’t expect a backlash from any cisgender people after several years of running articles saying pretty much the same thing as the cartoon.

    The myth that being trans is a lifestyle choice, that basic rights for trans people put other people in danger, is entirely invented. Here in the real world, being trans makes you a target. This was published this week too:

    BBC: A man has been jailed for setting fire to the home of a transgender woman after saying: “Anyone who is a tranny offends me”.

    Lee Harrison, 43, set light to the front door of her flat after trying to pour petrol through the letterbox.

    The woman’s flatmate, who was in at the time, said she “truly believed she was going to die”.

    Harrison, of Hallowmoor Road, Sheffield, was jailed for more than five years.

    Prosecutor Robert Sandford said the attack on 15 August was born out of a “hostility based around the fact [the victim] was in the process of transitioning from the male to female gender”.

    He said Harrison would call the victim “Steve” in the street and previously told her, “Anyone who is a tranny offends me; it’s a lifestyle choice.”